


The Smaller Worlds

by little_brisk



Category: Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Canon-Noncompliant Degree of Care in Navigating Interpersonal Relationships, F/F, Nonmonogamy, Not Not Crusher/Picard, meanwhile in la barre
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:02:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 46,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23378803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_brisk/pseuds/little_brisk
Summary: A slow story about two women finding their way toward being with each other and being in the world. A bit, too, about their attachments to the two men who are their Primary Relationships (NOS). A lot of processing, very few actual events.
Relationships: Laris/Beverly Crusher, Laris/Zhaban (Star Trek)
Comments: 125
Kudos: 42





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My enormous gratitude to @celestialskiff for heroic beta work, and to @aubrys for readings both incisive and indulgent.
> 
>  **Content advisory** : In roughly descending order of intensity of depiction: (1) a sustained close-third-person p.o.v. episode of a panic attack in response to a trauma trigger. (2) One comical scene involving a fair bit of blood resulting from accidental injury. (3) A fair bit of harmless drinking of wine and spirits throughout; in one instance it might qualify as self-medication. (4) Two brief descriptions of a past severe combat injury, frequent passing mention of its lasting effect. I am always happy to field requests for further info about possible triggers and how the content around them is handled by the story, or anything else at all. [tumblr](http://little-brisk.tumblr.com) is best; asks (including anonymous asks, for which no account is required) and DMs both okay.
> 
> A few more non-spoiler notes on things like languages and canon compliance at the end.

_The world  
was whole because  
it shattered. When it shattered,  
then we knew what it was. _

_It never healed itself.  
But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:  
it was a good thing that human beings made them;  
human beings know what they need,  
better than any god._

— Louise Glück, from ‘Formaggio’  
_Vita Nova_ (1999)

* * *

  


A communicator panel chimed at irregular intervals in the empty quarters of the _MS Peseshet_ ’s commanding officer. The glow of gibbous Jupiter and the pale reflection of the station slanted on the narrow room and its small signs of inhabitation: a knitted blanket of heavy wool folded neatly at the foot of the bunk, a small portable cabinet of printed books. In the corner by the door stood a travel case. The communicator panel chimed once more. Silent minutes passed, and three low tones indicated a new message. Then the wheeze of the door opening, and the light from the corridor, and laughter just behind it.

‘Lights!’ The room transformed.

Beverly tossed her labcoat across her case and turned, still laughing, to her first officer who stood in the corridor in a wry pose. ‘Didn’t anyone ever tell you it was inappropriate to speculate on your superior officers’ leisure activities?’ she said.

Alyssa smirked. ‘Just saying, sir, you do talk about her an awful lot.’

She made a show of checking the time on the wristwatch she didn’t wear. ‘You’re lucky I’m officially off the clock, Commander, or I’d be writing you up for conduct unbecoming.’

Alyssa quirked an eyebrow. ‘Sorry, _Captain_? Does that imply you’d be doing the paperwork yourself? Or would you like me to start writing my own reprimands, too?’ 

‘Ouf. Fair point. Look, just try not to blow up the ship while I’m gone, all right?’

‘We’ll take good care of her, sir. _You_ , meanwhile,’ she said suggestively, ‘take good care of—’

Beverly cut her off with a warning finger and a mock-scowl. ‘Behave, Ogawa. Right, she’s all yours. Anyone asks, I’m already gone. _God_ , it’s gonna be good to get some atmosphere.’

‘Have a bit extra for me, sir.’ She gave a crisp—and more than a little sardonic—salute, and Beverly returned it, laughing as the door closed and she turned to gather her things.

The three tones sounded again from the communicator panel, and this time, she heard them. She played the message.

It was Jean-Luc, sitting in an unfamiliar room—apparently aboard a starship, which wanted some explaining—and rubbing his chin the way he did when he knew she wouldn’t like what he had to say. 

‘Beverly.’ He paused. ‘Ah, damn, I really was hoping to catch you before you disembarked.’ She checked, saw the log of missed calls, and swore. ‘I’m afraid I won’t be at the vineyard when you arrive. I have had to depart at short notice, on what I can only assure you is the most urgent necessity. There are so many things that… There is much I wished to speak with you about, including my present mission and its motives. Since I cannot speak with you myself, I shan’t risk recording sensitive details; Zhaban and Laris will have to fill you in. Which is the other thing I called to say—please, please don’t cancel your leave—’ 

‘You condescending bastard,’ Beverly muttered, smacking the pause key a little harder than she meant to. She stared at the blurred still image of his face. She hadn’t really known until now how intensely she’d been looking forward to this—to him. How much she’d staked on spending long slow time with him. On having his full attention. 

She tried to hail the address from which the missed calls originated; tried again; again. The ship must have gone dark. Then it caught up with her: what in god’s name could he be doing, flying off to wherever at no notice? With whom? On _what_? That was no Starfleet communication code. What in _god’s name_ could he be doing? 

She took a deep breath, counting the times he’d tried to reach her (thirteen in all), and tried to be less angry. But the sob in her throat wouldn’t ease. She played the message over from the beginning, and focused on his tone, his voice, his earnestness. It soothed the tension in her muscles. A little. She let it go on.

‘—please stay at the vineyard for as long as you would like. I am—Beverly, please believe me, I am so very sorry that I won’t be there to greet you, but Zhaban and Laris will take good care of you.’ He smirked. ‘Laris has been particularly looking forward to having you.’ The slightest pause before the last two words made them sound incredibly lewd.

‘Oh, what the hell do you know,’ she said, but still and all, he’d made her laugh. And it was just as well he couldn’t see her blush.

‘Beverly—oh, I don’t know what to say. I know you won’t like any of this, and I do realize that I am disappointing you, but I hope you also understand that I would not be doing this without very good cause. I hope I will be home in good time. And when I am, all of my time will be yours. Take care, and—and I’ll see you soon.’ The video lingered for a moment on his half smile, his hand resting on his chest, and closed to black. 

‘Motherfucker,’ she breathed. ‘Mother _fucker_.’ She whacked the screen again for good measure. 

She watched the message over again—and again—as she tossed her uniform and labcoat into the replicator in exchange for slacks and a turtleneck, and for the sake of whoever she might encounter between here and the shuttle to Earth, tried to talk herself down from murderous to containably irate. 

Her reflection showed her pale and tired. Nothing she could do about that, really, not until she’d slept for a week. But she bound her hair atop her head, containing its white mass—grown dull in recycled air and sonic showers—to a passable approximate chignon, and replicated a pair of big round shades. It’d do. 

She left the blanket for Alyssa, who would take over the captain’s quarters for the duration of the _Peseshet_ ’s time in dry dock. She took the books. She looked again, inanely, at the black communicator screen. She sighed, and shouldered her case, and headed for the transporter.

The room was still and planet-lit again, and no sound disturbed its silence.

* * *

It was exactly as good as Beverly had daydreamed for weeks to breathe the air of a planetary atmosphere that naturally supported the life-form that she was. She had never been especially sentimental about Earth, but after a year alternating between the sterile climate of the _Peseshet_ and various wildernesses of austerity or poison, just the sight of the blue-green dot from space had nearly made her weep. And now the prospect of eight whole weeks in its heavy, wet, oxygen-rich air was enough to get positively stoned on. The plaza of the transporter hub abounded with planet-smells—eucalyptus and lavender and rosemary, and _dirt_. No one who’d never lived in space could understand the blessed smell of dirt. And the unseasonably warm October sun, glancing brightly off the rose-colored flagstones, gave her some hope for easy days ahead.

It wasn’t long before she spotted Zhaban trotting toward her, waving cheerfully. His coveralls and flat cap were looking less and less like an affectation. He’d be playing pétanque with the old men in the village square before long.

‘Still leaning in to that rustic lifestyle, I see,’ she said, and hugged him warmly. 

‘Sorry I’m late—I really was making a delivery, as long as I was in town.’ He held her tightly at arm’s length, giving her a good looking-over, which always made her feel a bit girlish and self-conscious. ‘It’s good to see you, Captain.’

‘Good grief, Zhaban, would you not?’ Still leaning into that devoted-life-of-service thing, too, apparently. Or maybe he was teasing her. She could never quite tell.

He gestured a concession as they walked out toward the landing zone. ‘Beverly. It _is_ good to see you. Laris was busy harassing a Ferengi wholesaler over subspace, or she’d have come along. She’s been looking forward to your visit.’ He _smirked_.

‘I really don’t know what you people think you know,’ she said, and he grinned exactly the way Jean-Luc would have. Pair of old gossips, was what they were. Anyway, what _did_ they think they knew?

‘Many things, Beverly. Many things.’ Zhaban opened the hatch of the vineyard’s local haulage flier, and a blur of pit bull careened out of it and squarely into Beverly’s bad hip. 

‘Easy, mon grand,’ she laughed, leaning down to scratch his scruff. ‘Okay, okay, yes, _hello_ , yes, here I am!’ She straightened and held up a hand for _sit_. He did not sit. He ran circles around her legs, gave one low bowing woof, and hopped right back into the flier snap on Zhaban’s command. 

‘So what the hell has gotten into him?’ she said without preamble as she fell into her seat.

‘Hey, cut him some slack, he has trouble with obedience when he’s excited about people,’ Zhaban replied with a sardonic smile.

‘ _Zhaban_.’ 

‘Oh, you mean _him_. He, I’m sorry to say, has trouble with obedience regardless of circumstance.’ She swatted him, and he laughed. ‘But I take it he managed to reach you?’ he said more soberly.

‘Almost. A message. Asshole.’ The dog’s head in her lap and his anxious eyes when she stopped patting him forced her to calm herself. ‘Not you. _You_ are a good boy,’ she said. Number One panted happily. 

‘I’ll do my best to explain on the way,’ Zhaban said carefully. ‘You can get Laris’s version at home; it will, no doubt, differ substantially.’ 

‘Hah. No doubt.’ _At home_. He said it so casually these days. In her anger with Jean-Luc, she had forgotten what else she had been looking forward to. The house, the land, the food, the time to spend with friends—and yes, fine, particularly Laris. And the wine. And the dog, for that matter. She took a deep breath, then another, and did her best to let herself feel some of the relief of being on leave, being planetside, being almost—if not home, then someplace like it.

She let Zhaban fetch her a cappuccino, got the dog to comply with a lie-down command, and settled in to hear things she did not want to hear.

* * *

By the time Beverly retired after dinner, her conception of time was so distorted that she couldn’t make any calculation that made sense to her of how many hours her ‘day’ had in fact lasted. But the sight and the smell of the room she’d come to think of as hers—polished wood aglow by lamplight, the view of the moonlit vines—was so welcome that she almost didn’t feel her exhaustion. On the desk, she found a bouquet of late roses from the front garden, and on the pillow a little box, which yielded on inspection a small scrap of folded paper tucked into the circle of a bracelet that Beverly had lost swimming in the river on her last visit. She’d been devastated; her grandmother had given it to her the day she left for San Francisco, more than half a century ago. It was the only token of Felisa that she had kept, and it seemed impossible that it could have been found. She inspected it: it had been polished, and the clasp repaired, but the worn inscription on the inside that read ‘B.H. - F.H. - 2340’ was not a thing that anyone could have known about to replicate. When she unfolded the tiny note, it read only ‘Found it! — L’. Beverly flushed, and clutched the bracelet to her chest, and found she needed to sit down. 

The thing about Laris was that they all had a point. Alyssa and Jean-Luc and Zhaban, and also Deanna and Will, co-conspirators. Kathryn had been after her about it, and Kate and Nella, and Marie, and, most relentless of all, Wesley. For all she knew, Felisa might be haranguing her from beyond the veil. They all had a point. 

The point was that sometime many years ago her friends had started to notice, long before she did, that she couldn’t stop talking about this woman she hadn’t even thought she _liked_ , this cagy spy with her taciturn partner and her blackbox past and her inexplicable claim on Jean-Luc’s loyalty. There’d been one moment in particular, five, six years ago, at a party, a big gathering here at La Barre, when Laris had said or done she no longer recalled what to make her laugh or blush or whatever it was. What she did remember clearly was how, at the other end of the room, Deanna had whipped around to pin her with a wide-eyed, detail-hungry, _we’ll-talk-later_ smile. How at the first opportunity, Deanna had taken her unceremoniously by the arm and led her on a forced moonlit march around the vineyard until she confessed in words what she’d hardly let herself admit she had begun to feel. If Beverly had harbored any illusions that Deanna would leave it be after that, they had since been thoroughly shattered.

She’d started to make excuses to spend time at the vineyard—Jean-Luc would happily have met her anywhere, but she’d find some reason to go lightyears out of her way for the chance to sit up late and talk with Laris long after the men were snoring on the couch with their books in their laps. She’d started doing things like waking before dawn to catch her coming in from a run, just to see her sweaty and exhilarated. Doing barre exercises on the terrace railing not just because it was (really) the perfect height but in hope of being seen from the kitchen window. Ordering precious boxes of the little candied fruits called _mirfiallen_ that the Romulan heritage gardeners were beginning to export, and carrying them halfway across the galaxy just to see her eyes light up and hear the ecstatic sound she made when she first bit into one. The stupid giddy thrill of the private jokes they began to have between them, and what it was like to meet her wry glance across a table and know they shared a thought. And it wasn’t just one-sided, it couldn’t be—she hadn’t imagined the special cast of Laris’s many smiles, nor the many little things Laris silently went out of her way to do for her, nor how often Laris discovered excuses to spend time alone with her, nor indeed that Laris did seem conspicuously often to come out from the kitchen halfway through Beverly’s workout and pretend quite badly to be surprised to find her there. 

But the deployments of the _Peseshet_ were long, her visits never more than a few days, and it was easy in the intervening stretches to forget how sharp those moments were, to feel she must have exaggerated all of it to herself, both her own intensity of feeling and what she imagined Laris’s to be. So it was easy, too, to think her friends were just having a laugh, just taking the piss. But Jean-Luc wouldn’t tease her into making something out of nothing, and she had a feeling Zhaban would rather die than make a joke of Laris’s heart. They, and all the others, it could not be denied, had a bloody point.

And the point was, finally, the stupid dizzy feeling that had made Beverly grin like a fool the moment she’d laid eyes on her that afternoon, leaning in the doorway in work boots and a smock, with her wild hair and her quick smile, lovely and easy jogging down the walk. Beverly had heard Zhaban laugh behind her when she lifted Laris in a hug and spun her round, but she hardly minded—it was a joyful thing, laughing all three together. There was a piece missing, of course, a voice conspicuous in its absence, and they’d felt that all three together, too. She looked down at the bracelet in her hand, ran her thumb over the inscription, and clasped it onto her wrist.

It would take her time to work through what Zhaban had told her, and Laris had added over dinner—the first version seemed like one Jean-Luc would approve of; the second made Beverly wonder how Jean-Luc had got away at all. She wasn’t ready to start thinking about what would happen if he didn’t return, or about what this group would be without its crucial fourth. She’d resolved to talk herself into a place where this quest of his was no different than when she was at Medical and he was at the fringes of known space aboard the cursed ship _Enterprise_. Or in Cardassia after the war, when she’d wait months between messages from the _Verity_. As for what the visit from Moritz Benayoun portended—well. She simply wasn’t ready to start thinking about alternatives.

She stripped down to her Starfleet-issue tank and briefs and stretched out on the huge four-posted bed. The sheets smelled of lavender; that would be Laris, too. She thumbed Felisa’s bracelet, unable to stop thinking of Jean-Luc out there. _Raffi Musiker_ was a name she hadn’t heard in a long time, and she thought there must really be something to whatever he thought was going on, if Raffi of all people had agreed to share space with him of her own free will. But it had been more than a year since Beverly had seen him, and his correspondence was always heavily curated. Maybe they’d reconciled. It wasn’t completely impossible. As for the business about these android girls, and Bruce Maddox—another name from ancient history—it only dredged up old grief. It had taken her by surprise, how strange it was to remember Data in the vivid way that Zhaban’s and Laris’s stories had made her remember him. It had been so long, now, and it wasn’t until the image of Data dealing cards in his absurd plastic visor had surfaced from the depths that she’d really been struck by how different Starfleet had been in those days. Huddled in its present atavistic defense posture, it seemed suddenly unrecognizable.

She reached to turn off the lamp, and pulled the duvet over herself. She had eight weeks to let Starfleet’s identity crisis be someone else’s problem. But she thought what a miracle it would be, if these girls were what Jean-Luc thought they were. She drifted, and her mind lingered at that poker table on the _Enterprise_ , memory enmeshed with dream, and thinking what a miracle it would be, she slept. 

* * *

When Zhaban came down early the next morning, he found Laris at the kitchen window, looking out. Motionless but for the idle flex of one bare foot, moving to some inner rhythm, she watched something beyond his sight. The slant light of October outlined the edges of her, a faint gold aura, and brought out the copper-colored threads that work outdoors in summer had combed through her hair. These many years on, he could not tire of seeing her so undisturbed. He shuffled across the kitchen, let the cups clink as he made the tea, hummed softly to himself, so that she would hear him coming.

‘Ah, there you are, you lazy arse,’ she greeted him, a smile in her voice. 

‘Here I am,’ he said, laying a hand on her shoulder.

She took her mug from him without looking; she reached up to hold his hand in hers; she leaned back against him while she sipped her tea. Routine; miraculous.

He followed her eyeline, curious about what had so captured her attention, and laughed aloud. Laris elbowed him. ‘Uh huh,’ he said, still chuckling. ‘What’s she doing out there?’ Beverly lay on the terrace in the sun, folding herself into various shapes in slow repetition. 

‘It’s called _yoga_ ,’ said Laris. ‘I think it used to be a spiritual practice of some kind. Now it’s just,’ she gestured derisively, ‘that.’ 

‘Not that you mind watching.’ He got another elbow in the ribs for that, and laughed again.

‘I don’t, if you must know. _And_ ,’ she said, reaching back to pat his thigh for emphasis, ‘I’ve just finished inventorying the whole year’s vintage, so I think I’ve earned a reward. What do you have to say for yourself?’

‘What I have to say is remember who supervised every press of every grape in that inventory of yours, and inspected every seal on every barrel.’ She made a conceding gesture. ‘But you really do deserve a reward. Why don’t you take a break for a week or two? A real one.’

‘And leave you to your devices?’

‘Har har. Seriously, think about it—the vintage is on the books, tourist season is over, more or less, and Francine and I have everything else under control.’

‘More or less,’ she said sardonically.

He chuckled. ‘Yeah, fair enough. But give yourself some time for the garden, time to catch up on your reading. Time,’ he said pointedly, ‘for her. Anyway,’ he added, bending to kiss the parting of her hair, ‘you’re mean when you don’t sleep.’

She squeezed his hand. ‘I’m mean when I do sleep.’ 

‘Listen, _you_ said it.’ 

She laughed. ‘All right. I’ll think about it.’ She turned to look up at him. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She held his gaze a moment, and squeezed his hand again before she turned back to the window.

He watched her watch Beverly a moment longer, hoping that whatever she was wanting, it wasn’t hurting her. Then, stroking the back of her neck one last time, he shuffled off to see about breakfast.

Truly, truly, he could never tire of it.


	2. Chapter 2

Woken by the sun, Beverly lay for a moment basking in the exquisite disorientation of reacquaintance with the concepts of daylight, morning, planetary sunrise. She had no calibration for correlating times of day with slants of light, but she thought it must be early. She forced herself not to ask the computer, and sighed into the feeling of not knowing.

She called Deanna first thing, as she had promised to do, and the first thing Deanna said, before so much as a hello, was ‘How’s Laris?’, with her big dumb beautiful smug smile. She grew a little more subdued, though less surprised than Beverly expected, when she told her about Jean-Luc; Deanna had always seemed somehow able to take him in her stride. At the end, Kestra hopped into view with an enthused update on the medicinal garden Beverly had helped her plant, and signed off with a sing-song ‘Have fun with your _girlfriend_ ’ fully worthy of a twelve-year-old and a Troi at that. 

But for the better part of four decades, conversations with Deanna had been lowering Beverly’s blood pressure, and this morning was no different. She printed a set of sweats from the replicator—slightly closer-fitting than her usual, for no especial reason—and, when she remembered ballet was off-limits, a mat, and took herself downstairs.

She rolled her mat out on the terrace and set to work unrolling her spine, too. Deanna hadn’t wholly grasped her concerns about Jean-Luc, which in itself felt strange. It was always a little unsettling to talk to her at a distance, when she could keep things unperceived. It felt like lying, almost. But just as well, for now; she didn’t think it was for her to tell Deanna things like what she thought his state of health might be. And it wouldn’t have changed Dee’s advice at all, which was, as she had known it would be, to focus on her present, not his future. So now she just did her best to stay in her body, move through the poses, and breathe out the anxiety. ‘I fucking hate this’ wasn’t the most effective mantra, but Alyssa and the computer had set her this regimen for her hip, and she had sworn to do her best to follow it. She could see the eventual benefit, but as it turned out, when you were the one who actually had to do it, physical therapy was a massive bitch.

She was working on holding a Reverse Warrior for longer than she had since the injury when she heard a voice behind her: ‘Hey, isn’t torture illegal in the Federation?’ 

Beverly smirked to herself. She held on to her focus, exhaled slowly through the long shift of balance that brought her back to standing straight. Then she bent to swipe her towel off the mat, and turned just in time to catch Laris biting her lip. ‘Who’s being tortured?’ she said brightly, with what she was sure Will would call a shit-eating grin. 

Laris just laughed. ‘What do you want from me? I’m only mortal.’

‘Well, coffee, for a start, if you’re offering.’

‘I am. Choice of pastry?’

‘Zhaban’s own?’

Laris stood on tiptoe and folded her hands in front of her, putting on a caricature of his open-voweled voice. ‘Every ingredient sourced from within walking distance!’ 

‘Okay, that’s just uncanny,’ she laughed. ‘And yes, I will absolutely be having a pain au chocolat—two, probably.’

Laris’s little bow was Zhaban to a tee, too. She turned back toward the kitchen, and Beverly watched her go, admiring the lines of her, the drape of a loose sweater that left everything to the imagination, the way the strap of her work belt framed her hips.

‘Christ, Crusher,’ she muttered to herself, ‘you’re a disgrace.’ 

She gave herself one more go at that Reverse Warrior, but it went shaky after just six seconds. She swallowed her frustration and dutifully cooled down with a set of the prescribed gentle stretches, if only so that she could answer truthfully when Alyssa inevitably inquired. Just as she was standing—with a not insignificant hiss—Laris returned with a heaping tray of pastries, fruits, and spreads, all arranged around a cafetière from which came an aroma that made Beverly’s eyes roll back in her head. 

Laris grinned as though she’d counted on just that. ‘Zhaban made friends with a chap from—Guatemala? On your Western continent?’ Beverly nodded, pretending not to hear the jab at obtuse Federation geography. ‘They met at a conference last year, and now Zhaban trades him bottles for beans.’ She poured out a cup and handed it to Beverly with an expectant smile.

‘Heavenly,’ Beverly moaned after a sip. Exaggerated for effect, perhaps, but true enough; real coffee brewed from real beans, grown out of the ground and roasted, was a rare treasure indeed. She took a pain au chocolat from the tray and tore into it without ceremony, and inquired about the state of the local barter economy just to listen to Laris talk—and to be exempt herself while she ate her way through absolutely everything in sight.

A little stab of guilt caught up with her as she realized she was grateful for Jean-Luc’s absence, grateful that she got to have this morning just this way, and Laris to herself. Laris sort of unfurled like this, not focusing all her energy through him; Zhaban content to leave them to their privacy, instead of hovering to attend on the old man’s whim. And herself free to be however she wished, without the constant consciousness of his sometimes too-knowing gaze. She flirted more, for one thing, and felt Laris glow with the attention. She could say what she pleased, uncensored, a little louder, a little more crass than she would let herself be in front of him, and she could enjoy making Laris cry laughing where he would only roll his eyes, however lovingly, at her disregard for his narrow definition of decorum.

Once she had had her fill of artisanal flaky pastry—though hardly of Laris laughing—she spent a while with the replicator in her room, taking absurd pleasure in the selection of a handful of garments that weren’t military in origin. Clothes that fit however she wanted, covered and revealed her however she pleased. Underwear in shades other than grey. Linens and woolens and cottons. _Separates._ Blue jeans and a plain button-down shirt in soft forest-colored flannel seemed the very pinnacle of luxury to her. She hung her little wardrobe in the ancient hulking armoire in her room, feeling a little silly to be so invested in such a superficial fantasy of domesticity. But it relaxed her into the idea that she could stay put for a while.

She opened the window wide, and sat herself at the desk before it to cope with the hundred or so new messages that had come just since she’d beamed off the shuttle. Focus nowhere to be found, she gazed out at the mesmerizing brightness of the vines under the sun, and saw Laris walking out with the dog. She turned, looked up at the window, and waved. Beverly waved back, and sighed contentedly, and watched her out of sight.

* * *

The next morning, they walked together into town along the canal, Laris reacquainting Beverly with the little world of the vineyard and the village. There was Francine, big and bluff, out in the field overseeing the soil treatments that would nourish the vines over the winter, and her wiry sardonic counterpart Max who minded the cellars and the bottling facility; they lived with a few others just up the hill, and grew lavender in their wide field. Wherever August found Beverly each year, Laris always found a way to get a sachet of that lavender to her. There was the little gatehouse at the edge of the property where a waspish retiree called Amandine kept vigil over assorted goods for tourists, and further on down the towpath, the ancient lockkeeper’s house that had been made over into lodgings, which Laris told her tended to attract itinerant artists who delighted her simply by virtue of offending the sensibilities of the village’s more conservative elders. Beverly wondered idly how many mediocre watercolors of the vineyard there were in the world, decorating the homes of people who had passed through here. And there was the little village itself, two hilly clumps of houses rising to either side of the island between the river and the canal, where a café sprawled across a flagged terrace between centuries-old shopfronts where local crafts and foodstuffs were distributed. 

Laris knew everyone, and greeted everyone, with degrees of intimacy indexed partly by the various terms by which she introduced Beverly: ‘notre amie qui nous rend une petite visite’ to some, to others ‘une collègue ancienne de Picard,’ and to friends, most thrillingly, she was simply ‘ma copine’. 

They picked up a few skeins of yarn for Zhaban from a young man who seemed overjoyed at the chance to return some favor, and a teenager with blue hair and a lot of piercings animatedly talked Beverly through her array of cheeses and spoke knowledgeably about the wines of Château Picard, clearly eager to impress. The butcher ribbed Laris fairly crudely about her pretty friend, and Laris gave him a dressing-down so rapid Beverly couldn’t follow it. ‘Bastard,’ she muttered on the way out. ‘But no better sausages for a hundred miles at least.’

They stopped on the way home at the dairy that adjoined the vineyard, Laris knocking perfunctorily at the house before walking right in, calling ‘Allô! C’est moi!’ like she did it every day. 

Beverly remembered the outrageously handsome farmer Sami and her warmly gregarious partner Béatrice from years gone by, and remembered quite vividly indeed how difficult she found it to speak at all coherently when Sami was looking at her. A person not easy to forget. 

Béa made her coffee and chattered at her in prettily accented English about the livestock and invited her to come and meet their horses if she wished, asked if she had children and compared notes on her own precocious teenager, while Sami and Laris soberly went through the village ritual of reviewing who had died and who’d been born and who was sick and who, in Laris’s neutral terminology, was ‘a desperate auld fecker.’ They left laden with fresh eggs and butter and a pint of the goatsmilk yogurt Beverly had been dreaming of for the past year.

‘Whoof,’ Beverly sighed, laughing, as they walked away. ‘I don’t know how you manage to be in the same room with them and breathe normally.’

Laris smirked at her. ‘Hopeless, you are. But Sami has that effect on everyone.’ 

‘Not you,’ Beverly observed.

‘No. But only because I know she doesn’t much care for me.’ 

‘That’s hard to believe.’ 

‘Aren’t you sweet,’ Laris said sardonically. ‘But her father died at Khitomer.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah. So.’ Laris shrugged. ‘Zhaban, for some reason, is immune. Not just with her. He can win over anyone. You know, how he just reeks of harmlessness.’

Beverly snorted. Even given all she knew—not to mention all she guessed—she had trouble imagining him hurting anyone, for any reason. Unless, perhaps, they messed with Laris. ‘You do seem to really be… integrated, here, though, if that’s not too fraught a word.’

‘Took more than ten years, Beverly,’ Laris said with a cynical laugh. ‘And almost all of them still think of us as foreign.’ And it was true that especially among the older villagers, Beverly had sensed a frostiness that bordered on suspicion. 

It occurred to Beverly that she didn’t know Laris and Zhaban’s cover story with these people—the atmosphere would be much more than frosty, if anyone here knew they were ex-Tal Shiar. It couldn’t be that they had no cover; they were too professional to leave so large a vulnerability exposed. But it seemed, too, uncharacteristically careless not to have briefed Beverly in some way. Unless Laris—paranoid, hypervigilant, conspiracy-minded Laris—had simply trusted her to be discreet? That strained credulity, but as they walked in easy silence, Beverly did wonder.

‘It’s good to have you here,’ Laris said as they approached the house. ‘Makes me see this place with fresh eyes.’ She stopped to look up at her, cradling her bounty of farm goods, as though there was something more she wanted to say, but that was all. 

‘I like seeing it through your eyes, too,’ Beverly replied. She understood it in a way Jean-Luc never had; to him it was a neutral background, but to Laris it was a living problem to be solved.

Laris looked at her a moment longer, then smiled a little sadly, shook her head, and nudging Beverly’s shoulder with her own, walked on.

* * *

The days went on like that. The weather held, and so did the tension that ran between her and Laris like a tether. 

Mornings belonged to them; breakfast on the terrace, long walks along the river, in just a few days accumulating more time alone together than they had ever had. Instead of brief hours of dense intensity, as they were used to, they had time for sharing silence, slowness, ordinary tasks. Laris involved her in her garden work, took her foraging for chestnuts and mushrooms, set her to things like chopping wood and digging tiny furrows with her hands for planting beans. A different kind of intimacy had room to grow in those spaces, one Beverly was not entirely prepared for and did not know that she could name. 

Evenings they shared with Zhaban, whom she began to see in a new light, too—his warmth, his quiet sense of humor, the pleasure he took in the food he and his neighbors grew and made, how he did really seem to thrive on finding what the best was he could do for others. And then, how he and Laris were together; how the default sardonicism of his expression dissipated when he listened to her talk, how the constant tension in her shoulders eased when he entered a room. How their ease with each other easily made room for Beverly—she had feared those evenings à trois, at first, but the strain or awkwardness she’d steeled for never manifested. 

And in between, Beverly relished long hours entirely her own. She used the time mainly for work—writing her column for the _Chronicle_ , maintaining her correspondence, reviewing manuscripts, keeping an eye on the _Peseshet_ ’s databases. Preparing endless references. She was so unaccustomed to silent, uninterrupted time for thinking that she managed somehow to be less productive with those stretching afternoons than in the quarter-hour stolen snatches of free time aboard ship, but unproductivity itself was such a novel way of being that she hardly cared. And slowly, she adjusted.

But she felt the absence of Jean-Luc at every turn. Passing by his study, not seeing him absorbed in writing—that is, pacing and muttering to himself—or walking with his dog and not hearing his abominable sort of French; sitting at his table in the absence of his voice telling stories, lecturing, hectoring, defending himself against three people who all knew him far too well, above all laughing. The empty kitchen in the mornings, where no ‘Good morning, Beverly’ and no kiss on her right cheek awaited her. 

She woke one dark morning from a banal, transparent nightmare in which he could not remember who she was, and shouted fearfully at her to stay away. It stayed with her all day, made her feel half an intruder in his house, and had her reading late into the night far deeper into the literature on Irumodic Syndrome than could possibly have been a good idea. But she renewed her deal with herself to, among other things, grant him the dignity of making his own choices, however stupid they might be, and also not to let herself be overburdened by things she could not, for the moment, change.

* * *

One evening at the end of her first week, after a long swim in the clear, cold river, Beverly stood in the steamy luxury of the hot-water shower til the chill in her bones thawed, and marveled at the absence of all the pressure she hadn’t realized she was carrying when she left her ship at Jupiter Station. As she toweled off, she studied her reflection, and decided the woman she saw there deserved to be dressed well for dinner.

The days in the sun had begun to fill in her space-pale features with color, and blazes of freckles had spread across her nose and shoulders. They showed bright against the white of her hair, and she recognized a version of herself she hadn’t seen in quite some time. She chose a simple dress of grey-blue linen, which hung straight from its straps to just below her calves, and pulled the gold hoops Deanna had given her for her seventieth from her jewelry case. She dried her hair and left it loose, falling in its waves to her shoulders; a little time in atmo had done wonders for it. A bit of copper lipstick and the simple summer loafers she’d been wearing every day, and she headed down.

She found Zhaban and Laris laughing in the kitchen, circling each other playfully as they laid out the abundance of gastronomic riches Beverly was becoming used to. It was rare to see them together so unguarded, and it gave her a feeling of immense warmth that when she said her bright ‘Bonsoir!’ they didn’t seem to take it as an intrusion.

‘How do you make that look so good?’ Laris said, quite frankly eyeing her up, gesturing with her wineglass. ‘Sure, it’s just a sack with notions.’ 

Beverly laughed. ‘Why thank you, Laris, that’s very flattering.’

Laris shrugged. ‘I thought so,’ she said, with a dazzlingly suggestive smile. 

‘Very elegant,’ said Zhaban with emphasis, passing Beverly a glass of a beautiful-smelling, very pale white wine. ‘You’ll like that,’ he said. ‘Wish I could say it was one of ours.’ 

They laid the table together with meats and cheeses, greens and grain salads—‘Every ingredient sourced from within walking distance!’ Zhaban said proudly, and Laris met her eye across the table and they didn’t manage not to laugh. They ate without ceremony and picked up a debate about Vulcan cinema where it had left off last night—Zhaban would not let go of a point he’d tried to make about the influence of the philosophy of Surak on narrative structure, and Laris wouldn’t stop offering counterexamples from classic Romulan film, and Beverly thought they were both missing the most important point, which was that no one wanted to sit through five hours of plotless reasoning when they could instead be doing literally anything else. By the time the bounty on the table was significantly reduced and the conversation had somehow made its way round to the topic of the strangely addictive properties of Ferengi musical theatre, Beverly was finding it difficult to imagine a time when she had found these people more than strangers.

After the meal, Laris went out with the dog, and Beverly stayed to help Zhaban clean up, simply because it was nice work to share with someone. Shipboard life suited her in so many ways, but the sort of curatorial care of a permanent place, of _things_ , the investment in things you could develop given space and permanence, had its own kind of allure. She knew it would be ridiculous to tell someone who worked with his hands every day how she relished washing dishes, so she kept it to herself and just smiled and accepted when Zhaban laid away the last of the crockery and offered her a cognac.

An awkwardness fell into their silence as Zhaban leaned on the island, looking into his glass as though searching for something. ‘It’s really good for her to have you here, you know,’ he said eventually.

Beverly braced for the usual. ‘That so?’ she said as gamely as she could.

‘Hah. No, I mean, kidding aside.’ He paused, tapping a finger on the rim of his glass. ‘She took Picard’s leaving really hard. I’m sorry; I know it’s not easy for you either. But she’s struggled so much to find a purpose here, and with him away… It’s fine for me, it’s _great_ for me, I love this shit, growing vegetables and making bread and measuring soil acidity and going to farm association meetings. But she wasn’t made for this. She’s good at the work, you can put anything in front of her and she’ll do the best version of it that can be done, but... I don’t know. When it’s just the two of us I think it feels like playing house to her.’ After another searching pause, he looked up and met her eye. ‘Have you been up to her crow’s nest up there, in the old bell tower? It’s a one-woman listening station. She spends all her free time holed up up there, building heuristics and running anything she can tap into—which is everything—through them. Starfleet’s lucky she has no plans to turn traitor—do you people know your security’s a joke? Because Laris does. But when I say _anything_ I’m not kidding. If you have any questions about the interpersonal drama that goes down on long-haul freighter channels, she’s your girl. Beverly, she’s such a fucking genius and she doesn’t have anything to do with it. So she makes these puzzles for herself, which is fine so far as it goes, you know, gross contravention of the law notwithstanding. Every exiled ex-spy needs a hobby, right? But then there’s also… like, she’s got a Zhat Vash conspiracy wall. For real. You should see it. I mean like, from a medical angle. We’ve been through some weird shit, but this... is its own kind of weird. I think she gets lost up there, sometimes. Sometimes I don’t…’ His voice went taut, and he cut himself off with a heavy sigh, scrubbing his palm over his beard.

‘Zhaban…’ She had never heard him say so much in a week, let alone all at once. She did know about Laris’s inclination toward conspiracy theories, and about her security compulsions—the cameras all over the property were, in fairness, a bit weird, and over the years she’d gotten so used to discovering disruptors in unlikely places all over the house that it no longer seemed as abnormal as, perhaps, it should. But she didn’t like the feeling that Laris would hate for her to be hearing any of this. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m just not used to having someone to talk to who understands her. Who might pay enough attention to worry about her.’ That sounded like a pretty brutal indictment of Jean-Luc, for one thing. ‘But I didn’t mean to just vent at you,’ he went on with an apologetic smile. ‘I had a point, and my point is: since you got here she hasn’t been up there once.’

‘I see.’ Somewhat at a loss, she sipped her cognac and wondered what Laris’s account of her own habits would be.

‘Sorry,’ Zhaban said, chuckling awkwardly. ‘That was a bit much, eh? I just mean—I’m just glad you’re here. I just... love what you do for her.’ 

To that, Beverly couldn’t come up with a single thing to say. ‘Come here,’ she decided, and hugged him. ‘Thank you for saying that,’ she said into his shoulder. It seemed so inadequate. He held on to her for a long moment, then pulled back, squeezing her shoulders. 

‘All right, enough of that,’ he declared, shaking himself out. He clapped his hands, put on a smile only a little strained, and pointed finger guns at her. ‘Time for some tunes, yeah?’ 

‘Uh, sure, yeah,’ she said, trying to catch his sudden shift of mood. He grinned and swiped at the computer interface. Bright synthesizers filled the room and cut right through the heavy tension between them. 

‘Oh, no,’ Beverly laughed.

‘Yeah, fair enough, Laris doesn’t tolerate it either, here—’ He reached to change it, but she stopped him. 

‘No, I love this stupid song. She’s right, it’s awful, and I love it. But the holo absolutely wrecked my crew for about a month.’ 

‘They tried to learn the dance?’

‘They tried.’ She was pretty sure her spontaneous mess-hall demonstration of the bridge section—table jump and all—had earned her more respect from the _Peseshet_ ’s junior ranks than anything she'd ever done, or indeed would ever do, in the line of duty.

‘And?’

‘It has been my experience that that kind of rhythm and that kind of flexibility rarely combine in a single humanoid body.’ 

Zhaban laughed. ‘Sounds about right.’ But when the chorus came around, he slid into a fluid-enough approximation of the hip-roll-shoulder-slide thing that had caused more pain complaints aboard the _Peseshet_ than her significant resources could cope with. 

‘Wait. _What_?’ When Beverly fixed her attention on him, he looked a little frightened. Wouldn’t be the first time. ‘Do that again,’ she ordered, ‘but don’t lift your weight off your back leg.’ He laughed again, but he did it, and he did it right. No self-consciousness, no hesitation. ‘Are you kidding me?’ she yelped. ‘Why the hell am I only now learning this about you?’ She set her glass down and stepped into the more open space in front of the island, beckoning at him. ‘Computer, replay from beginning. Okay, you start left, I’ll start right.’ 

‘You’re serious?’

‘Fucking right I’m serious—resist that urge to move on every beat, keep it simple, keep it fluid, okay—what?’ She plucked his glass out of his hand and set it down, then licked the resulting splash of cognac from her thumb, and he laughed at her again. She shrugged happily. ‘Come on, this is the dream, my friend—don’t miss the drop, here, three, four—’ and they were off. He moved like water and he didn’t miss a step. He was even singing along in the original Andorian. She was stiff and her hip ached, but within a few measures she was moving on a plane where pain couldn’t reach her. And when he effortlessly made the time change, she thought she might be in love. They skipped the table-jump.

The record went on; she didn’t know the other tracks, but he did, and the rhythms were catching, and improvising was so much more interesting than those pop-holo tricks. He wasn’t just in control of his own movements, he knew where she was, too, and how to use the space between them. She began to be a little embarrassed that she’d presumed to instruct him. She pulled him close to see what he would do, how he’d use the advantage of his height, and she wasn’t disappointed. She let him lead, and he touched her like a dancer, all for the movement; not something that could be said of most men she’d known. She hadn’t moved like this with another person in years—someone who could not just keep up with her but challenge her, see and understand her and form themself to her. She wanted to throw her head back and howl, but if she did she’d fall out of step, and she wanted this to last forever. 

Halfway through a third song, Zhaban squeezed her shoulder and said ‘Uh oh’ in an alarming tone. He cast a subtle smirking glance toward the other side of the room. Stuttering out of her rhythm, Beverly turned—to find Laris standing there with her padd out, recording them. Beverly shrieked, then clapped a hand over her mouth. Zhaban cracked up, leaning on her shoulder.

‘Oh, no! Don’t stop!’ Laris cried, laughing. ‘No! That was too good. Damn it, Zhaban!’

‘You sneaky bitch,’ Beverly laughed, leaning back against the island and trying to catch her breath. ‘How long have you been there?’

‘Long enough,’ Laris said happily, tapping and swiping at her padd with dismaying speed. 

Beverly took the glass of water proffered by Zhaban and shook a finger at Laris. ‘Don’t you dare let me find that on a public feed.’ 

‘You won’t _find_ it…’ Beverly gasped accusingly, and Laris smiled and shook her head. ‘Kidding. Just sending it to Deanna, and … maybe a few other people.’

‘Sneaky bitch,’ Beverly breathed, catching Zhaban laughing at her out of the corner of her eye. ‘More importantly, why didn’t you tell me about this?’ She jerked a thumb at him.

‘Good, isn’t he? His mam was better.’ 

‘She _thought_ she was,’ Zhaban corrected.

‘No, she definitely was. Where do you think I got it from?’ She sketched a pretty convincing—and pretty distracting—hippy little two-step. 

Beverly wailed. ‘ _Why_ didn’t you people _tell_ me?’ 

Zhaban pouted. ‘Why didn’t _you_ ever ask us to dance?’

‘Why have you _stopped_?’ Laris complained. She punched one last key on her padd, dismissed the interface, and pocketed it. ‘Or shall we take this outside?’ She hefted a fresh bottle suggestively. ‘Bring the music, beloved—but don’t come near me with that Andorian crap.’

The night was cool and clear and starlit, and fresh air felt sharp and sweet against Beverly’s flushed skin. As Laris poured out glasses of something sparkling and Zhaban lit the lanterns, some quality of magic descended on the scene so that Beverly saw it briefly as though from a great remove, saw how decades from now she would look back and see this moment singular, entire, perfect. And then the sounds of glasses clinking, music playing, and Laris and Zhaban’s voices, laughing, snapped her back into the present.

It turned out that Laris’s preference was for a fast and tricky old-fashioned Romulan genre, heavy on horns and percussive strings, whose basic syncopated movement was easy to adapt to, but which lent itself to getting very complicated, very fast. It also worked best in pairs, which seemed dangerous, among three. 

But Zhaban’s patience, showing her the steps, eased her anxiety. His intuitive way of responding to her body, his calm, unjudgemental demeanor, made him an ideal teacher, and she told him so. Then Laris cut in and Beverly watched them as they elaborated the foundation gradually into something more and more intricate, and the way they moved together was something to see. They traded lead and follow seamlessly, and some form of communication passed between them that was beyond dance, a mutual understanding of their bodies in space and time that Beverly had rarely seen. 

It was true that Laris’s ability surpassed Zhaban’s and, Beverly had to admit, also her own, at least at this stage of her life. You couldn’t keep up fluidity and form like that unless you trained every day—which made Beverly wonder what else Laris’s crow’s nest was for.

When Laris broke off to pour herself a fresh glass of wine, she fixed Beverly in her sights, eyeing her up just exactly the way Irina Dmitrievna had every day of Beverly’s season in Moscow. Only when it was Laris visually dissecting her like that, the feeling was lightyears away from the emotional terrorism of an unsmiling artistic director. 

Wine in hand, Laris danced up close to her and placed her free hand on her hip. ‘Well? Let’s see what you can do, m’shiv’na.’ Zhaban hooted. Beverly wondered if it would be wise to look that one up. She mustered her composure and managed a few measures, keeping up well enough to satisfy her dignity, but Laris just shook her head and passed Zhaban her glass. 

‘That’s not in any way helpful,’ Beverly said to his laughter. 

‘I’m sorry. I’ve been there, Bev. I feel you, I really do.’ But he didn’t stop laughing.

‘Shut up,’ Laris said, all over bright, delighted mischief. The tautness so attractive in her at a distance became in close contact an exhilarating intensity, undeniable demand in every muscle, every movement. She placed both hands on Beverly’s hips, patting the left one. ‘Loosen up, it’ll hurt less if you stop trying to protect it.’ Now, how the hell had she known? But Beverly didn’t have the bandwidth to both dance and argue, not with Laris’s hands on her like that. She loosened up. It wasn’t enough. ‘Get those hips moving and the rest will come,’ Laris encouraged her. She didn’t know what to do with her arms, so she raised them above her head, flexing her fingers to the rhythm. Laris nodded. ‘Just the hips.’ Fully conscious that she was flushing top to toe, conscious of Zhaban’s scrutiny as well as Laris’s, she closed her eyes, measured her breath, and let it all wash right over her. Isolation had never been her strong suit, but she imagined her body as a marionette controlled from the hips, and gradually slipped sideways into that place where all thought reduced itself to body, music, and space. Laris’s firm fingertips were her only anchor points in an empty universe, guiding her to where she was meant to be.

One of those points became a different kind of pressure, and the universe expanded again. The look in Laris’s eyes had changed, and for the first time her breath was coming short. She moved closer, planting one hand firmly on Beverly’s lower back, keeping the other tight on her hip. Beverly mirrored the hold and let Laris’s body instruct her—by the rhythm of her hips, her feet, by the pressure of her hands, the movement of her scapula under Beverly’s palm. Laris added one step, then another. ‘Yeah,’ she breathed at last, ‘there you go. That’s the real thing.’ It was difficult to maintain in its own right, and the intensity of her consciousness of Laris’s hands, her body, her hot, unwavering gaze, her sheer proximity, only made it harder. But the thrill of moving at the very limit of her capacity combined with the thrill of that heavy wonder in Laris’s voice, praising her, inviting her into this thing that was her own, were enough to keep her dancing, possibly, forever.

As the music wound down, Zhaban hollered and clapped, and she suddenly became aware of what they must look like together. Laris moved with her and held her gaze til the very last beat, then abruptly grinned, pushed back, and bowed. Straightening, she high-fived Zhaban and stripped her sweater over her head, leaving her in a t-shirt that clingingly outlined her breasts and bared her midriff when she raised her arms. Beverly stared, still wholly unrecovered from the dance. She’d never seen her so exposed. 

She broke her transfixion with deliberate effort, turning to pour herself a glass of water, and realized that she was sweating, breathing hard. ‘Whew!’ she exclaimed, leaning casually back against the table, putting on a smile, and hoping for the best.

‘Think you passed,’ Zhaban said, raising his glass, and his tone of sardonic understatement was so gratifying that she couldn’t look at him for a moment. 

‘For now,’ Laris said forbodingly, but she too was out of breath, and her eyes were full of something new.

It was less fraught after that. They danced together, all three, in a kind of freedom Beverly had forgotten the feel of, and the darkness beyond the terrace gave the impression that the little patch of gold light where they danced was its own whole little world. Trading partners, trading tricks and showing off, and getting sillier and sillier as they progressed through one bottle, then another. Around one o’clock, after performing with Laris a parody of competition routines that made Beverly laugh til she could barely stand, Zhaban begged off, bidding them goodnight with a quite obvious insinuation of how he expected them to carry on without him.

But Laris grew stiff in his absence. ‘Yeah, think I’m for bed, too,’ she said, and killed the music, and started gathering up bottles and glasses. Beverly couldn’t deny that she was exhausted, but the abrupt declaration of an end to the evening caught her off guard. 

‘Can’t talk you into one last glass?’ she said, heart in her throat and hoping against hope it sounded careless.

Laris gave her a not very convincing apologetic look. ‘I’m wiped,’ she said. 

Beverly helped her bring everything in, wash and dry the glassware, and tidy it all away, wishing all the while to no avail that Laris would break the tense silence that had so abruptly fallen between them. But she only moved around her, giving every appearance of not actively avoiding her yet somehow never quite turning toward her, either.

‘G’night, then,’ Beverly said at last, a little desperately, before they parted for opposite wings of the house. 

Laris finally stopped and looked at her like a normal person. With an inscrutable soft smile, she reached up to lay her hands on Beverly’s shoulders, raised herself on tiptoe, and placed a gentle, lingering kiss on Beverly’s cheek. ‘Good night,’ she said with a slightly sadder smile. Then she tossed her sweater over her shoulder and slipped off to her room, leaving Beverly to stand there absolutely poleaxed.

It was a long time before she could make herself turn, and go upstairs, and get undressed, and much longer still she lay unmoving and unsleeping in her bed, wondering about what had happened, and what hadn’t.


	3. Chapter 3

Laris was late to rise the next morning, but greeted Beverly cheerfully as though nothing were at all amiss, and made up for missing their morning walk by proffering a picnic lunch that Zhaban had packed for them. There was nothing strained in her, as they strolled down toward the river together, which only increased the feeling Beverly had that she had got something really quite significantly wrong. It was silly, maybe, to be distraught over a little awkwardness and a chaste goodnight kiss, but she couldn’t help feeling that something between them had lost its footing, or that she had been on the wrong footing all along. She found for the first time since she’d arrived that she didn’t know quite what to say at any given moment, that her reactions felt miscalibrated in every instance. 

At the bottom of the hill, a low flat slab of sandstone jutted out into the river, running low in this dry season, clear and sparkling in the sun. They settled themselves there, ‘Like basking lizards,’ Beverly said, and Laris at least laughed at that. 

Laris kicked her shoes off and rolled up her trousers, and with an abstracted look sat dragging her feet through the water, watching water and sunlight spill off of them. Like stripping off her sweater last night, it was a significant departure from her usual modesty, the Romulan habit she had guarded closely of being always loosely covered, top to toe, even among friends. Beverly did her best to conceal her sharp interest in the captivating movement of her metatarsals, and tried not to wonder what it meant to Laris to be barefoot in front of her.

‘So,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘What’s in the bag?’ 

‘Ah.’ Laris brightened again. ‘The essentials of existence.’ She pulled them out one by one, arranging them on the rock. ‘Baguette. Camembert. Saucisson. Oh, figs! Glassware, crucially.’ She unwrapped two wine tumblers from a tea towel and brandished them with a suggestive grin. ‘And a bottle of… last year’s chardonnay. Sorry. Zhaban’s gotten a bit dragonish about the cellar.’

‘Hey, still beats anything I ever get to drink anywhere but here. By miles. You getting spoiled?’ she teased.

‘Absolutely.’ Laris poured and handed her a glass. ‘To that,’ she said, and drank without further ceremony.

‘To that indeed,’ Beverly said, and Laris winked.

Beverly peered into the bag. ‘Wineglasses, but no cutlery. Priorities, I see.’

Laris flipped a knife out of the sheath on her belt in a dexterous gesture that made Beverly’s mouth go dry. When she sliced a round of sausage against her thumb and offered it on the flat of the blade, Beverly had to work very hard to keep her hand steady as she took it. She cast about desperately for something to say.

‘Is it always this warm here, this time of year?’ Not the height of conversational suavity, perhaps, but she really was wondering—she was sure she remembered October in La Barre as a time of woollens and wood fires.

‘Lately, yes.’ Laris sliced a fig with effortless efficiency, and offered that too.

‘Time for a recalibration of the local environmental net?’ Beverly said, in what she hoped was a totally normal voice.

‘Not just the local one,’ Laris said in a tone that suggested less than complete faith in the Climate and Atmosphere Agency. ‘Don’t get Zhaban started on it.’ 

‘Why, what’s his position?’ 

Laris shrugged and licked a smear of cheese from her thumb, and Beverly thought she deserved some kind of award for not choking on her own breath. ‘He’s not wrong,’ she said. ‘Neither the Federation nor Earth Central is willing to commit resources to infrastructure maintenance, much less wholesale upgrades, for a matter of a few degrees of temperature.’

‘Really?’ That _was_ interesting. Beverly looked out across the water and tried to focus. She knew a lot about the early stages of implementing climate management technology, but almost nothing about the politics of its maintenance on metropolitan worlds. ‘Not that it surprises me. What’s the issue?’

‘At this point Earth is every bit as terraformed as any colony moon, right? There’s nothing you could reasonably call natural about this climate anymore. So, basically everything about the environment just reflects political priorities.’ Laris rolled her eyes and gestured with her glass, warming to her theme. ‘And the tech is resource-heavy, and the personnel demand isn’t nothing either. So they put quite a lot into flood infrastructure—as they should—and they keep a close eye on the ice—as they should—but beyond that? Something like subtle temperature change, and their definition of “subtle” is not exactly scientific, doesn’t rate a mention. Because the only people it hurts are farmers, and our work is classified “ _nonessential_.”’ The acid in her tone could have cut through tritanium. ‘And when you’re not talking about people at all… Animals? Flora? Ecosystems? Don’t even bother.’ She shook her head, tearing off a hunk of bread like she wanted to hurt it.

Beverly struggled to keep her face neutral. Who was it she wasn’t supposed to get going on this, again? But it was so good to see Laris so animated about something, so good to hear that casual first-person-plural.

‘I believe that,’ she said. ‘Non-sapient life is never a priority in planetary management out there either.’ It was appalling, to see what Federation colonial authorities were willing to annihilate sometimes, just because some jumped-up local governor thought a planet wasn’t quite M-class _enough_. 

‘Mm. For example,’ Laris said, around a mouthful of bread, ‘Picard told me he and Robert used to fish in this river, when they were lads. Do you see any fish? Anything at all alive? This place looks idyllic, but ecologically, it’s completely fucked. More than half the resources of the vineyard go to staying on top of parasites and diseases that didn’t even exist a century ago. Not to mention what it does to the growing season.’ She laughed and shook her head. ‘Ah feck, I do sound like him, don’t I.’

‘I won’t tell,’ said Beverly, smiling at her. ‘It’s good to see you so invested.’ 

Laris rolled her eyes. ‘Now _you_ sound like him.’ Which was flattering enough. 

‘Have you always been so interested in ecology?’ Somehow, Laris didn’t seem to fit the profile. 

‘No,’ she scoffed. ‘Ask Zhaban what a helpless city girl I was when we found ourselves trying to live off the land on Yuyat Beta.’ She laughed, and Beverly enjoyed the image. But then the twist of her mouth turned sour. ‘But, you know. For _some reason_ ,’ she said with intense sarcastic emphasis, ‘since then I’ve become just a little sensitive to the idea of being careless with a living planet.’ 

Beverly drew a sharp hissing breath. 

‘Sorry,’ said Laris. 

‘God, no. On the contrary.’ 

Laris sighed and tossed the last bit of her bread back into the bag, leaning back on her hands with a quiet little frown. 

‘Last night…’ she said eventually, and Beverly wondered how obvious her effort at composure was. But Laris only turned a searching sort of look on her. ‘I loved getting to see you dance like that. I love that Zhaban and I got to share that with you. I really was sorry to cut it off so abruptly.’ 

‘I didn’t think anything of it,’ Beverly baldly lied against the flush that burned across her face, entirely unprepared for blatancy. Laris gave her a skeptical smirk, but only shook her head and looked away again. 

‘It’s just…’ She sighed, and was quiet for a while. ‘There aren’t a lot of places left where you can hear that music,’ she said, squinting into the middle distance, and Beverly felt suddenly very selfish and very stupid. ‘Not a lot of people living who can play it, or have ever danced to it. When I was young, you could walk into your choice of clubs in any city on the homeworld.’ She gave a wistful little smile. ‘That’s how I started dancing. Sneaking into places, all of fifteen, very stupid, I assure you. But now… I’m sure there are places, in the colonies, and so much work is being done on cultural recovery, I don’t mean to discount that, but…’ she trailed off.

Beverly waited, but Laris kept her silence. There was an irreducible wall you came up against, sometimes, when your entire world was dead. There was, perhaps, only so much you could share with an outsider before that wall came between you. Beverly knew a little about that. Arvada III had only been a little colony, not a world, not a whole culture, and she wouldn’t insult Laris with the comparison, but it had taught her enough about what couldn’t be understood by people who had homelands to return to. She laid her hand over Laris’s and sat silently with her, watching the patterns of sunlight on the water.

‘You do know you’re not off the hook for dancing with me,’ she said when she thought it had been long enough, and the smile that broke across Laris’s face warmed her straight through. 

‘I think I can spare time for a few lessons,’ Laris said, jostling her elbow. She raised her glass: ‘Pour me another?’ 

‘Gladly.’ Beverly’s fingertips brushed Laris’s as she took her glass, and Laris kept that sweet smile trained on her, and as she poured she couldn’t quite contain a nervous laugh. ‘I’d love to hear sometime about that city girl on Yuyat Beta,’ she joked, to cover for her silly self. Laris took her wine a little more caressingly than seemed strictly necessary, and gave another of her little smirks. 

‘I bet you would,’ she said, like she knew exactly what she was doing. But all she deigned to say was, ‘She was someone else entirely.’ Many someones, Beverly imagined. 

‘Can I ask you something about that?’ 

‘All right.’ Laris tensed a little. ‘No answers guaranteed, though, understood?’

‘Yes.’ There was something in Jean-Luc’s account of how he’d met them there, secretly allying with the local population against their Romulan governors, that Beverly had always wondered about. ‘Is it true that just falling in love with Zhaban was enough to get you exiled?’ 

Laris stared at her for a beat, then tipped her head back and laughed like it was the best joke she’d ever heard. ‘Ah, feck, I’d forgotten about that,’ she said, wheezing. It took her a long time to recover. ‘Did he really tell you that?’ Beverly nodded. ‘You know, in retrospect, it’s unnerving, how naïve we were about you people, how far we were trained to underestimate you. But that utter shite was the kind of thing we thought some Federation chump would go for. And he _did_! Sentimental eejit. Bless him.’ 

‘I’m pretty sure he still believes it,’ Beverly said, stuck in a starkly divided loyalty between her delight in Laris’s laughter and the thought of poor old Jean-Luc having his heart melted by a canned love story.

‘No!’ Laris said, all over disbelief. ‘Oh, the poor man.’ And she cracked up again. ‘Don’t get me wrong: sure, if he hadn’t, we’d be dead now. I’m very grateful for that eejit and his sentiments.’ She wiped her eyes and sighed, shaking her head. ‘I’ll have to set him straight when…’ she trailed off. ‘Ah, feck,’ she said again, in a heavier tone.

‘You miss him, don’t you?’ 

‘Very badly,’ Laris said plainly. ‘You must, too.’ It struck Beverly as strange, suddenly, that they hadn’t really talked about it. 

‘Very badly,’ she admitted. ‘Not,’ she hastened to add, ‘that I don’t feel very lucky to have this time with you and Zhaban, but…’ 

Laris waved her off. ‘No, of course.’ 

They sat quietly for a while, and Beverly had the sense that Laris shared her feeling. Perhaps they hadn’t talked about it because there wasn’t really anything to say. She knew how intensely, almost blindly, devoted Laris was to Jean-Luc; Laris knew how closely Beverly’s life was bound up with his. Both of them knew only that he was out there, vulnerable and in danger, and that there was not a single thing either of them could do about it. There really wasn’t much to say. But it was good to have someone to share the feeling with.

‘What’s the story with you two, anyway?’ Laris asked, and it caught Beverly off guard. She hesitated, running a fingertip around the rim of her glass. It had never been a question to which she’d had an easy answer, and it seemed suddenly strange both that Laris had never asked her, and that she should ask now. And also strange that she didn’t, somehow, simply know.

Conversations with Laris tended to do this to her, tended to meander for a while and then abruptly reach some point of crisis—it was the Tal Shiar in her, perhaps, that led you around the hinterlands of a subject before pouncing, pinning you down right in the center, on the question you didn’t even know had been at issue all along. And then again. And yet for all that it was never less than honest. Beverly had mistrusted her a long time, precisely on the grounds of the Tal Shiar in her, and of that feeling of being always led around, one step behind her; but over the years she had never detected in her anything like deceit or treachery or insidious intent. And once you knew it was safe—more or less, relatively speaking—it could be vertiginous to just let her do it, to step blind into her world and let her take you by the hand and lead you where she would.

So when Laris asked her now, casually sipping her wine and looking out over the river, ‘What’s the story with you two?’, Beverly knew whatever answer she gave would be a step into the black. She went willingly.

‘Oh,’ she laughed, shaking her head. ‘Well, it’s, you know. A lot of things.’ She was going for cool and evasive, but something about Laris heated her cheeks, made her feel silly and coy and naïve.

‘… Such as?’

‘Don’t give me that look.’ She wanted, after all, to be honest. ‘It’s hard to describe. There’s a lot of history. He’s—I’ve known him almost all my life, and it’s never been just one thing. We’re very close, we’ve always had—something, between us, something never quite… or, well. He’s my best friend, but he’s also…’ She trailed off, and laughed again. ‘This is harder than it looks. It’s a lot of things.’

‘Why do you find it so hard to describe?’ 

‘Oh, come on, we’re talking about over fifty years of… _a lot of things_! Do you think this should be easy?’ Laris just looked at her expectantly, like a dare. Vertiginous. ‘Okay, fine, clever girl: what’s the story with you and Zhaban?’

Laris didn’t hesitate. ‘He is, and has always been, the companion of my life.’

‘That simple?’ 

‘No, not simple. But I don’t find it hard to describe.’ She paused, and Beverly waited. ‘All right. How’s this? A bond that developed from the pressure of necessity became a thing we chose, became necessary in its turn. We have witnessed and experienced things that we can share with no one else; we have shared everything with each other. He is the only person I have ever fully trusted, and the only one I have ever felt I could not live without. Our intimacy has taken many shapes, in many places. We have been many versions of ourselves together. I have lived with him all my life, and I intend to die with him.’ 

‘Well. That’s all very Romulan of you,’ Beverly said defensively. 

‘Because I can see clearly and describe with precision the central features of my own existence?’ Laris raised her glass. ‘Sure.’

‘No, because of the commitment to extremity.’ 

‘Yeah, that’s racist.’ 

‘ _And_ the clarity of vision, and the capacity for loyalty.’ Beverly laughed. ‘I just think you’re being a little unforgiving of the vagaries of the heart, is all.’

Laris scoffed. ‘The heart! How very _human_ of you. We do not locate love in the heart.’

‘Where, then?’

‘The spleen.’ 

‘… You don’t.’

‘We don’t.’

‘Fine. It was racist.’

‘It was. But look, Beverly, here is the point,’ she said, as though explaining to a recalcitrant pupil. ‘The point is, one: if after all that you think the fact that you don’t know whether or when or how Zhaban and I have ever shared a bed, or been sexually intimate, or been “ _in love_ ”, or married, or whatever you think the key thing is, if that’s what makes our relationship a mystery to you, well, I can’t help you. And two: if it’s so hard for you to describe your attachment to a man who’s so important to you that you can’t imagine life without him, perhaps the problem is not the complexity of the attachment, but your reluctance to describe it.’ 

If Deanna’d been there, she’d have been standing to applaud.

Beverly felt a little bulldozed, but she could find no objection she could raise, with any honesty, to that argument. ‘Right. Okay,’ she said. ‘You know what I think?’

‘What?’ She looked smug the way a bloody-jowled predator looks smug.

‘I think I never should have introduced you to the concept of relationship advice columns.’ 

Laris laughed. ‘And I think you’re seventy-five years old and have yet to learn to use your words.’ She _really_ liked those advice columns.

‘Getting a bit Qowat Milat on me, Laris?’

Laris raised her glass again. ‘Absolute candor has a lot to recommend it.’

‘That’s a strange thing to hear from a spy.’ Why was it so thrilling to hear her say it? What radical challenge in it rattled in Beverly’s ribcage like a snare drum?

‘Ex-spy,’ Laris said automatically. She shrugged, sipping her wine. ‘On the contrary. You can get a lot out of people by being blunt with them. Anyway, I’ve done my time with subterfuge and secrets within secrets. Much more into life in the open, these days.’ To punctuate the point, she stretched into the sunlight, horribly attractive. 

‘All right, then you might as well tell me,’ Beverly ventured, ‘why you asked me to begin with. About me and Jean-Luc.’

Laris didn’t miss a beat. ‘It was the opening gambit in a bid to find out what kind of room whatever there is between you might leave for me.’ 

Beverly had so enjoyed being led that she’d forgotten to look out for the pounce, and Laris spoke so plainly that it took her a moment to catch up. ‘For… you?’ she said, sounding just as stupid as she felt. 

‘Mm.’ Laris swigged the last of her wine, set her glass down, and fixed Beverly in a gaze so intense and so frankly, nakedly desiring that it literally stopped her breath. ‘But since you seem to be in rather a muddle about it, I don’t think I can expect a reliable answer. So I’d best let you sort yourself out.’ She gave Beverly’s knee a condescending little pat. ‘Get back to me when you can say it in ten words.’ And with a wry and pointed far-too-knowing smile, Laris stood and turned to walk back toward the house, leaving Beverly feeling not so much pounced on as like she’d just been flattened by a cartoon anvil.

She stared out along the water for a moment, waiting for her lungs to reinflate. With inane, abstracted care and precision, she packed the food, and the bottle, and the glasses back into their bag. She felt cut off from the ordinary flow of time, stalled in a moment that wouldn’t progress. The thing, the giddy thing that she had been only half-hopingly inclining toward for years, the thing that had made her fret and giggle like a schoolgirl, that had kept her up late so many nights twitching with longing alone in her bed, the secret subsurface thing that had charged every interaction she had had with Laris for more than half a decade, had suddenly sprung into the open, and after all this time she was completely unprepared for it. 

‘Fuck it,’ she muttered, and stood. ‘Fuck it—ow, _ow_ , shit, shit, shit.’ She hopped on pins and needles and the stabbing jolt of her hip toward Laris’s retreating back, and called out her name. Laris didn’t hear her, or at least she didn’t stop or turn. Jogging lopsided through the pain, Beverly caught up with her, caught her wrist, and tugged her round. She was _laughing_. 

‘Laris,’ Beverly breathed, coming toe to toe with her and suddenly quite still. She dropped the bag. 

‘What?’ Laris swallowed tightly, and the laughter fell out of her eyes, but her stance was firm and her gaze a clear and steady challenge. Beverly held her wrist quite hard. She didn’t flinch. 

This close, Beverly could pick out the color of each strand of Laris’s hair, oaken, gold, or silver, and trace each line on her face like a river to its feathered delta. She could spot the motes of black that flecked her irises and study the exact mechanics of the flexing tension in her jaw, and though not touching could yet feel the whole shape of her body as a deep inclining longing to press that shape against her own. 

She thrust her fingers through her hair, held tight, and kissed her, hard. 

Laris whimpered, arched up into her, like an instinct, but then she tensed, pushed back, and shook her head, looking up at Beverly with a warning question in her eyes. Beverly was still holding on to her wrist. She eased her grip, relaxed the fist that had tightened in Laris’s hair, and tried to catch her breath. She couldn’t bring herself to let go altogether. 

‘There’s room for you,’ she said. Saying it felt like the ground falling out from under her, in the best possible way. ‘There. Four words.’

‘Really?’ For the first time, Laris looked vulnerable, looked like something tender and essential was at stake for her, too. 

Beverly laughed, a little hysterical and not caring. ‘There’s so much room for you, Laris, you don’t know how much. There’s so much space in here that’s all already yours. That’s been yours for years.’ 

A wry thing crept in and steadied Laris’s look. ‘Well, then you’ll have to show me around sometime.’ 

Beverly barked a laugh. ‘Oh, I’m sure I will.’ 

Then Laris cocked her head, the slightest gesture and the clearest invitation, and Beverly bent to kiss her again. This time she didn’t hold back. All impulse and action, nothing gentle, nothing coy, she pressed herself tight against Beverly, thigh and hip and belly and breast, gripped her waist with both hands, sank her teeth into her lip, and gave a long low moan that Beverly felt as a clench in her cunt so hot it hurt. Beverly whined against her mouth, wound her hands in her hair, and let herself be led. 

‘Yeah,’ Laris said, drawing back to catch a breath. ‘That’ll do.’ They both laughed, a little too hard. There had been, after all, quite a bit of wine—Laris, giggling, was distinctly wobbly. Beverly caught her by the hand, but she stumbled sideways, and first there was a crunching sound, and then the sound of Laris shouting expletives. Beverly looked down. A glass had rolled out of the bag, and was now reduced to shards—some scattered on the ground, and some buried in Laris’s foot. 

‘Jesus Christ.’ The wound, or wounds by the look of it, were already bleeding fast. ‘Jesus. Okay, hold still—no, don’t touch it. Let me—here, lean on my shoulder.’ Beverly bent and took Laris’s lacerated foot in both hands. ‘Yeah, yep, there’s quite a bit of glass in there, and looks like it's gone quite deep. _Laris_! Did I not _just_ tell you not to touch it?’ With Laris leaning on her, hissing and cussing, she cast about herself, but she had nothing with her she could use to clean or bind the wound, and once they got that glass out it’d only get worse. She eyed up the three hundred or so metres up to the house; there was no way Laris was going to be walking back. And she was bleeding awfully fast. ‘Okay, here’s the plan. I’m gonna carry you back to the house, is what we’re going to do.’ Laris stared at her, and then began to laugh all over again.

‘You’re not!’ 

‘I am.’ Beverly started laughing, too. She could taste adrenaline at the back of her throat. Her whole body was going into an emergency posture in total disproportion to the gravity of the situation. Still deliriously aroused, not to mention half a bottle down the well, and, apparently, panicking, she knew she could not possibly be thinking clearly, but she’d formed a plan and she was going to execute it.

‘All right. I don’t think I can take your weight on my hips, and I’m not strong enough to lift you damsel-wise’—Laris _cackled_ —‘so you’re gonna have to go over my shoulder.’ Laris was laughing so hard she was crying, now, and Beverly was losing the fight to contain herself too. ‘Okay? So I’m—stop it, I can’t breathe—I’m gonna sort of tackle you, around the waist, and you just have to lean your weight over my shoulder and—Laris, stop! This is serious! You’re really bleeding!’ But that just made Laris double over, hugging her belly and wheezing, hopping on her good foot, a dark emerald stain growing in the sandy earth beneath her. ‘Fine, I see I’m just going to have to manage in spite of you.’ Beverly sighed and crouched and notched her shoulder into Laris’s pelvis, and Laris shrieked, but all the same did her part to execute a precise, athletic lift, balanced perfectly even as she kept on giggling. ‘Keep your foot up,’ Beverly ordered, and as Laris complied, blood began to run down over Beverly’s shoulder. Beverly held on to her thigh, tried not to think about it, took a few steps, and groaned. ‘Has anyone ever told you you’ve got a very pointy iliac spine?’ Laris was going to choke if she couldn’t calm down. ‘Like a fucking _knife_ , Jesus.’ 

This was so stupid. She’d done it a thousand times in the field, and Laris’s weight had nothing on that of, say, a Klingon marine, but here, a stone’s throw from the house, drunk on wine and hormones, it felt incredibly stupid. Every inch of her body was going to pay for it, and her dress was for the replicator, and—it occurred to her only as she reached the terrace— _why the hell hadn’t she just run back alone for a regenerator and some antiseptic?_ She started to laugh again, and didn’t know if she could stop.

‘This is so stupid,’ she said aloud, letting Laris down as carefully as she could. ‘Keep that elevated.’ Laris, wiping tears from her eyes, lay back obediently on the deck, somehow an image of extraordinary grace even with that gruesome green stain growing down her leg. ‘ _So_ fucking stupid.’ Beverly ran for the medkit in the kitchen.

* * *

Zhaban heard the sound of laughter outside from his room upstairs, and set aside his reading. Not that he’d been focused on it—too distracted wondering what Beverly and Laris had been up to, whether all that flirting was ever going to come to any kind of fruition. The dancing had been his very last card. The picnic was really scraping the bottom of the barrel. And with Picard away, he had no outlet for speculation. He was, if he was honest with himself, beginning to run a little mad. He sighed and checked the clock: close enough to time for an apéritif, which was as good a pretext as any. He went by way of the kitchen, to prepare a tray with glasses, bottles, and various sweet things. He put on a casual, uninquisitive demeanor and hipchecked the door onto the terrace, a cheerful greeting on his lips.

The sight of Laris on the ground and the blood-soaked towel next to her stopped him dead, and nearly made him drop the tray. 

But she was still laughing, and the reassuring shape of Beverly hunched over her with an antiseptic cloth in one hand and a dermal regenerator in the other slowed his heart back down. Still, that was an awful lot of blood. 

‘It looks a lot worse than it is,’ Beverly called in an easy, even voice, keeping her focus on Laris’s left foot, which she held in her own bloodied lap.

‘It looks like a massacre,’ he said as lightly as he could, setting the tray clatteringly down, firmly bidding his stomach to settle. ‘What’ve you done to yourself this time, sahe’legge?’ 

Laris reached a beckoning hand toward him, making an effort to recover her composure. ‘I’m fine, e’lev,’ she said. He touched his fingertips to hers and smiled down at her, and tried not to look at the mug full of bloodied shards of glass next to Beverly’s knee.

‘She’s insane,’ said Beverly, closing up her kit, but her smile lingered, and she didn’t turn her fond gaze from Laris’s face. 

Laris rolled her eyes and gestured dismissively, but her smile would not be restrained, however she might be trying. She rested her feet, lovely and whole, in Beverly’s lap, and Beverly laid her bloodstained hands over them. It was astonishing how at ease she looked, with her bare feet in someone else’s hands.

‘I stepped on a glass, that’s all,’ Laris said. She and Beverly both failed to suppress a laugh. Both their eyes shone, and Laris had a practically post-coital look of spent exhilaration. Something had, it seemed, finally happened.

‘Did you?’ Zhaban smirked. Whatever it was, she would tell him in her time. ‘Still. That’s an awful lot of blood.’ He knelt, the better to hold Laris’s still-proffered hand.

‘It is,’ said Beverly, looking at him at last, a little gravity coming into her face. ‘You people have some delicate feet, I tell you what. And the wine didn’t help. But she really is fine. Just needs to lie down for a bit, keep her liquids up, eat plenty of haemoglobin-promoting food—which I don’t think will be a problem, around here.’ 

He thought of the cassoulet in the slow-cooker, the fresh eggs Sami had sent over, the cabbages and romanescos still flourishing along the back of the house, the side of beef to be delivered tomorrow. ‘No, it won’t. But the lying-down part might be harder.’ 

‘Did you not hear the woman say I need to keep my liquids up?’ Laris interjected, pointing at the bottles on the tray. 

‘ _No more alcohol_ ,’ said Zhaban and Beverly in unison. 

‘I’ll go… sort myself out.’ Beverly said, with strange emphasis. Laris chuckled sort of lewdly. ‘And then I’ve got some shattered glass to clean up. And your shoes to fetch, you twit. As for you,’ she continued, turning a stern face on Zhaban, ‘Get her some juice, and make her eat something. And keep her away from sharp objects.’

‘And open flames, and sheer drops, and so on. Yes, sir.’ The look she gave him was heavy with gratitude far beyond what was called for. 

She looked down at Laris. ‘Be good,’ she said, and by the lingering way they looked at each other before she turned back toward the house, you’d have thought they were wartime sweethearts parting at the front. Something had _really_ , really happened. Gods help them. And him! He really didn’t know how long he could reasonably be expected to wait for Laris to spill. He’d ask tomorrow, if he couldn’t take it.

‘I’m sorry for the blood, beloved,’ Laris said, in Rihannsu. ‘It really was only a little laceration.’ She smiled softly at him, stroking her thumb across his hand, and he realized how transparent his fear must have been to her, how intently he’d been scrutinizing her. ‘Truly. I’m just fine.’ She palmed his cheek. ‘You fretting old grandmother. Now, weren’t you instructed to fetch me things?’ 

He kissed the heel of her hand. ‘To serve at your command is my life’s sole purpose,’ he vowed, parodying the oath to the Empire they’d recited every day at school.

She laughed. ‘Your life’s reward to bask forever in my greatness?’ He pretended to consider for a moment, then shrugged and nodded: why not? She laughed again. What luck he had. ‘So are you going to get me some juice, or what?’ 

‘Hail, Praetor,’ he said, and went inside to do her bidding.


	4. Chapter 4

Late that night, Beverly was trying very hard to focus on some figures she’d promised to look over and failing very badly at it, a mess of scatterplots and symbols swimming in front of her eyes while her whole self, mind and body, was captivated by an unceasing series of sense-memories of sunlight on the river, of the glint on the blade of Laris’s knife, of the dare in Laris’s eyes, of Laris’s body pressed against hers, Laris’s mouth tasting of salt and wine, Laris’s ankles smooth under her hands, Laris’s delirious grin—when a knock at her door made her jump almost out of her seat.

She knew she gave herself right away the moment she opened the door and saw Laris standing there, and she couldn’t bring herself, particularly, to care.

‘Hey,’ she said, leaning on the door with a daft smile she couldn’t suppress. ‘How are you feeling?’ She looked worlds better. Her color had returned, and the glassy look had left her eyes. The cutting edge of medicine certainly had its thrills, but there was a special miracle in the kind of transformation that could be wrought by a good meal and a good nap.

‘Much better,’ Laris replied, and a moment’s awkward silence passed. ‘I was out with the dog and I saw your light was on,’ she said. ‘Just wanted to see if you needed anything.’

Beverly quirked an eyebrow, holding back a laugh. ‘Is that really the best you can do?’

Laris shrugged. ‘If not, I’ll say goodnight, so,’ she said with a teasing grin, half-turning from the door.

‘Get in here,’ Beverly growled, and took her hand and pulled her, laughing, into the room, kicking the door closed behind her. She leaned back against it and held her close, cupping her face with both hands and kissing her. Laris sighed into her, the most delicious feeling. The day had broken some barrier between them, cut through some last essential cord, and kissing her now seemed as natural as breathing. Natural, and so new. So much of Laris was sharp edges and hard lines and various intensities that the softness of her slow, exploratory kisses now was as startling as if she were someone Beverly had never met. Having spent so long feeling any proximity to her as tension, half-taboo, to hold her close now and feel the physicality of her as an invitation, as permission, as frank, unconcealed desire, was like a gift.

And the redoubled gift of long acquaintance and accustomed intimacy giving way, all of a sudden, to something all unknown, something wholly new: the newness of her like the newness of any sort of lover; the specific newness of her in her own particularity; the generic newness of her in her familiar-unfamiliar alien anatomy. What she felt like, under her soft layers, both more stocky and more bony than a human woman of her proportions would be—her pauldron shoulders, her ribcage like a fortress, the heavy ridgeline of her pelvis a shape that matched the blooming bruise on Beverly’s shoulder. The double-time pulse that beat so rapidly at her throat, and made Beverly’s heart beat faster, too. And—Beverly couldn’t help herself—the delicately curving points of her hopelessly attractive ears. It was almost impossible to resist the urge to touch them, kiss them, bite them, but she’d have to find out from Laris first whether that would be in bounds, or just some unfortunate fetishistic tendency on her part. There was so much to learn, so much yet to know about this woman.

‘You do look good,’ she said, a little breathless. ‘How are you feeling, really?’

‘Just fine, Doctor,’ Laris replied with a sardonically indulgent smile. ‘Really.’

‘And your foot?’

‘It’s grand,’ she said dismissively, and leaned in with a heavy-lidded look, reaching to pull Beverly back into a kiss.

Beverly held her off, frowning expectantly at her. ‘Any pain? Numbness? Discoloration?’

Laris laughed. ‘Seriously? _That’s_ what you want to say to me right now?’ She wriggled playfully, trying to wrestle her way back into kissing range, but Beverly, not brooking evasion, pushed back. ‘All right!’ she conceded, all indignance. ‘A little pain, dull, like a muscle cramp, like you said there might be. Hardly noticeable.’ She tugged an end of Beverly’s hair protestingly. ‘Honest!’

‘Hmm,’ Beverly said, but she let a smile twitch at the corners of her mouth.

‘If we’re done with the examination now?’ Beverly bit her lip and tilted her head consideringly, still holding her firmly at arm’s length, watching her frustration build. ‘Beverly! _Kiss me!_ ’

Beverly laughed and let her go, and Laris stumbled into her and kissed her with ungraceful hunger. She pulled Beverly with her as she backed her way into the room, stopping to pull her jumper with no preamble over her head, and then to Beverly’s astonishment her t-shirt, and, backing up against the desk, her simple cotton bra, too. She hopped up on the desk and pulled Beverly to her, wrapping her legs around Beverly’s thighs and fisting her hands in Beverly’s shirt and kissing her, and kissing her, and kissing her.

‘ _Laris_.’ Startled by the rush of it, by the suddenness with which Laris seemed to have vaulted over some threshold, daring her to catch up quick, overwhelmed by the simple feeling of Laris's bare skin under her hands, Beverly pulled back to catch her breath. She bit her lip and laughed a low, astonished laugh, gazing frankly at her, so attractive. Laris flushed—a rare sight, so compelling—and, laughing at herself, hid her face behind her hands. ‘Too much…?’ Beverly asked, a little at sea in the tug between how brazen Laris was being and how coy, between the modest Laris she knew and this Laris, bold and shirtless on the desk.

‘Fuck. No. _No_.’ She scrubbed her knuckles across her cheeks, then dropped her hands into her lap, a disarming little shrug. ‘It’s just… been some time,’ she said with a sheepish smile. ‘Since I’ve been used to being looked at like that.’ Beverly had wondered. She wasn’t going to admit just how much she’d wondered. Not that she herself had exactly been racking up dates out in deep space. But she didn’t think Laris would react well to reassurance.

‘Ready to get used to it again?’ she asked, with her most seductive smile and both hands smoothing up Laris’s thighs.

‘So fucking ready,’ Laris moaned, circling her arms around her neck and kissing her longingly.

‘Then let me look,’ Beverly teased, pulling back again. After the years of furtive glances and feigned indifference and guilt-tinged lingering imagination, freedom to look—and look, and look—was overwhelming. ‘You’re so extraordinary,’ she breathed. Laris tossed her head with a gamesome smile, but her breath was short and there was anticipation in her eyes. From the stark line of her clavicle to her tautly muscled arms, her perfect little half-moon breasts to the sweet self-conscious way she laid her hand across the soft slung curve of her belly, every detail of her staked some claim on Beverly’s attention, til she was overcome with the desire to consume her all at once. ‘You’re…’ she tried to say, but she didn’t have the words. She swallowed hard as Laris leaned toward her, brushed kisses down her neck, and with both hands began methodically to work her buttons open.

‘So are you,’ Laris said, nipping at her ear, spreading her palms across her stomach, parting her shirt and smirking to find her braless under it, giving her the same prolonged looking-over, as palpable as any firm caress. Beverly whimpered—she couldn’t help herself—and Laris kissed her with renewed intensity. ‘So are you,’ she said again, but her tone had changed, a deep, demanding growl. She hopped down from the desk, pushing Beverly back, tugging her shirt from her arms and tossing it on the floor, fumbling with the button on her jeans, kissing her, fierce and clumsy, as she backed her toward the bed. Beverly fell laughing onto the mattress, hitching down her jeans for Laris to pull them off, and laughed again watching Laris hopping out of hers.

‘Whatever,’ Laris said, grinning as she made a startlingly attractive go of tripping over herself and into the bed between Beverly’s legs. Scrambling into a more stable position, braced on her arms, hovering over Beverly with her knees tight against her hips, breathless with laughter and desire, she was the most appealing thing Beverly thought she’d ever seen. ‘Got you where I want you now,’ she teased, and Beverly gazed dumbstruck up at her—and they both appeared to realize at the same time that they were, quite suddenly, nearly naked in bed together, and that this state of affairs was squarely outside of familiar territory.

Laris’s grin faltered and she swallowed hard. She traced the line of Beverly’s shoulder, stroked her thumb across the growing bruise there. ‘Did I do that?’ she asked softly.

Beverly smiled. ‘I’d say we both did, wouldn’t you?’

‘Right,’ Laris said with a gentle laugh, and bent her head to set her lips, soft and soothing, to the tender spot; her lips, and then her tongue, hot against the ache, and Beverly sighed. Almost involuntarily, she wrapped her arms around her, half lost in what it felt like to hold her like this, skin to skin, Laris’s legs entwining with hers, her shoulders smooth and cool under her overheated hands, and—Beverly gasped—her _mouth_ , her warm, wet, sighing mouth. Then Laris shifted to meet her eye again, to brush her fingertips, very softly, along her hairline, thread them through her hair; Beverly closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then another, and turned into her touch. ‘Beverly,’ Laris whispered, tracing the outlines of her ear, her jaw, and for the first time her gaze seemed unguarded. No feint or challenge, and certainly no joke, appeared to cloud the vulnerable wonder in her eyes.

Beverly couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that sweet, open face, so she arched up for a kiss, and pulled Laris down against her, flush against her body, breast to breast, hip to hip. Laris moaned against her mouth, and it reverberated the whole length of Beverly’s body.

‘I want you,’ Beverly breathed at last, which seemed outrageously redundant in the circumstance, but it was the only sentence she could form. ‘I want you, I want you. I’ve wanted you for—oh, god, I want you.’ She wrapped her legs around her and pressed her as close as she could and kissed her, and kissed her, rough, wanting kisses, and Laris gasped, moving with her, gripping her tightly.

‘What do you—’ she began at the same time that Laris said ‘Tell me how you—’ and they both laughed, suddenly shy, wrong-footed, startled by the newness of this thing. It was always surprising, this moment when certainty and confidence and experience and white-hot irresistible desire came up against the simple, awkward, beautiful fact that there was no way to know another’s body in advance.

‘Okay,’ Beverly said softly, stroking her back. It was a little late to have the _Shall we take off all our clothes?_ talk, so she moved right along. ‘Anywhere off-limits? Anywhere you don’t want to be touched?’

Laris shook her head, a little tightly. So, that’d need asking again. ‘You?’ Laris asked, with a sweet attentive headtilt.

Beverly bit her lip and grinned. ‘No, I want you everywhere.’

Laris laughed and traced a slightly condescending fingertip down her nose. ‘Everywhere? We’ll see.’ She swallowed, and Beverly saw in her eyes again that naked, frank desire that had so startled her that afternoon, on the rock by the river, what seemed a lifetime ago. ‘Can I—can I be… a little rough with you?’

‘Fuck.’ Beverly gasped and dug her nails into her back. ‘Yes. More than a little, if you like. Nothing sudden, and keep asking, and—hah—mind the hip, but, fuck,’ she smiled a breathless smile, ‘ _yeah_ , you can be rough with me. What about—what about you?’

‘Yeah,’ Laris said, ‘I’d—I’ll tell you. I’ll show you.’

‘I like the sound of that.’ She liked the sound of that quite a bit, as she emphasized by pressing her hips up against Laris’s, so that she sighed, pressing back down into her, a bruising weight of bone on bone.

‘Will you … tell me?’ Laris asked a little breathlessly. ‘Ask me? For what you want?’ As though she thought Beverly might say no.

‘Yes. And you.’

Laris nodded.

‘Nervous?’

‘A little,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t… I don’t want to hurt you.’ She laid her fingers over the bruise again. Beverly wondered if she’d maybe never been with a human before. _We’re not_ that _breakable_ , she wanted to say.

‘You won’t,’ she said instead, stroking her cheek. ‘I won’t let you.’ She took Laris’s hand from her shoulder to kiss her palm. ‘And you can mark me up a whole lot more than that,’ she promised with a hungry smile, and that provoked exactly the gutpunched desiring gasp she wanted. She drew her down to kiss her til she felt her anxiety ebb away. ‘Laris,’ she whispered, ‘show me what you want.’ The low, choked sob that was Laris’s response to that was among the sweetest sounds that Beverly had ever heard.

‘Fuck. All right. I want to just…’ she said, voice already ragged, raking her nails across Beverly’s ribcage and looking at her with such devouring intensity that Beverly’s hips jerked and a pitiful high-pitched whine escaped her throat. ‘I want to…’ She leaned over her, smoothing her hands along her arms til, fingers interlocking, she held her pinned. Beverly gasped and pressed back against her, stretching into the unanticipated thrill of her weight, her strength. ‘How’s that?’ Laris asked, finding her way back into that compelling cockiness, and Beverly nodded urgently. Laris grinned her wolfish grin, and kissed her with a startling slow softness. ‘I want… all of you, everything, I want to do fucking everything to you,’ she growled, with a kiss less soft and slow. She released one of Beverly’s hands to drag hers down Beverly’s throat, and that in combination with the way she licked her lips, that hungry look, promised that whatever it was she meant by ‘everything,’ Beverly wanted it.

Beverly laughed a slightly lunatic, slightly delirious laugh. This was not at all what she’d expected. ‘But for now?’ she asked, with calculated coyness.

‘For now,’ Laris said, bending to set her teeth to Beverly’s clavicle, sharp and sweet, so that she yelped and twisted in her arms. ‘How’s that?’ she said again, and Beverly sighed.

‘Yes. More of that, please,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t hold back, I’ll’—she gasped at the fresh pressure of Laris’s mouth—‘I’ll tell you if it’s—if it’s too much, oh, fuck, Jesus, _Laris_.’ That was most certainly going to leave a mark. ‘Yes,’ she sighed again, ‘ _more_.’

Laris’s low laugh against her skin was a delicious sound. ‘You’re exquisite,’ she breathed, moving slowly down Beverly’s body, kissing, biting, sharp and sweet, down across her chest, her ribcage, her belly, her hip, raising points of searing heat, then soothing them with her soft lips, her tongue. Beverly gasped and twisted in her arms, coming too easily undone under her mouth, her hands, astonished by her, by how confidently Laris took control of her, how unwithholdingly she wanted her. But soon it was overtaking her, soon it was too much to process, too much to contain, and she reached to lay a trembling hand along Laris’s jaw, down where she was kissing the curve of her pelvis, and said, ‘That’s good, that’s it, that’s the limit,’ and Laris turned to kiss her palm and rose up on her knees.

‘All right?’ she asked, holding Beverly’s knuckles to her lips.

‘God, yeah,’ Beverly half laughed. ‘Just a little… overheated.’ Laris smiled down at her, leaned over her again, placed her hands deliberately, carefully on her shoulders, and, slowly pushing her down into the mattress, watched her closely. ‘Yes,’ Beverly breathed, hands coming to rest on Laris’s thighs. Just the weight of her was exhilarating, the way that pressure relieved the tension in her neck, her shoulders, the way it opened up her diaphragm, changed her breathing. ‘Laris,’ she said, just to say it.

‘Just fucking exquisite,’ Laris said again, bending to kiss her mouth, a savage, demanding thing.

Then it was too much, too close, too heavy; suddenly, she needed air, and room to breathe; she needed control of herself again. She returned Laris’s biting kiss and said, ‘I’m gonna roll you over,’ and moaned with relief when Laris whined against her lips and clutched at her. She grinned against her mouth, and wrapping one arm tight around her waist, flipped her onto her back, settling above her, looking her over, not quite sure yet how she wanted this to go, where she wanted to end up, trying to choose a place to start.

‘Oh yeah?’ Laris said with a grin and a defiant little wriggle.

‘Yeah,’ Beverly sighed, still holding her tightly around the waist, and wound her hand in her hair, giving it a slow, experimental pull. Laris shouted and arched into her: talk about exquisite. ‘Good?’

‘ _Good_ ,’ Laris breathed, like it had taken her by surprise.

‘Good.’ She bent to kiss her neck, to feel that hummingbird pulse against her lips, and slowly tested her grip on her hair, to see how far she could take her, tightening, tightening, til Laris scratched at her shoulders, crying out—and then she loosed her hold and felt Laris sink back down, gulp for breath, and she soothed her with murmuring kisses up and down her neck. Then she did it again, tighter this time, slow and firm, whispering ‘You like that?’ in her ear, to see what she would do, and Laris convulsed, and grabbed her by the hair, too, clawing at her back, and kissed her so ferociously that Beverly thought she might draw blood.

When she released her, Laris slumped like a ragdoll into the bed, and they parted, panting, staring startled wonder at each other. She palmed Laris’s cheek, kissed her lips with all the softness she could muster, felt as much as heard her deep contented moan.

She rose up on her knees to catch her breath and get a good look at her. Both smiling, both bewildered, they breathed together til Beverly found the wherewithal to move again, bent her head to kiss her sternum, and Laris giggled as her hair fell across her sensitized skin. The giggle became a laugh, full throated, as Laris swept her hands across her back, up into her hair, arching happily into her kisses, and she laughed, too, and rose up again, and tossed her hair and smiled down at her, and what she saw—Laris so flushed, so full of wonder and wanting, Laris gazing up at her with that impossible smile—

‘God, you’re fucking gorgeous,’ she sighed, and dragged her fingertips down across Laris’s belly, hooked them in the waistband of her knickers. ‘Let’s get these off, shall we?’ she said, biting her lip hopefully. Laris nodded, lifted her hips, and watched her hungrily as she tugged them down and cast them aside.

‘Yours too,’ Laris breathed, and smirked as Beverly resigned herself to the indignity of fumbling contortions involved in getting her briefs down around her ankles, where Laris could kick them off. ‘Get back here,’ Laris ordered, pulling her down again on top of her, hitching one leg up between hers, rolling her hips in a way that made her lose her breath. Such a small difference, and yet now, this, pressed against her, feeling all the friction of her, wondering if she could feel her wet against her thigh, felt like a whole new world.

‘Laris…’ she sighed, and Laris combed her hair back with her fingers, kissed her, ran her hand down to press her palm down against her ass, held her there, moved with her, arched up against her, eyes hot, breath ragged, and she couldn’t help but whimper. ‘Jesus, Laris.’ She knew, suddenly, exactly what she wanted. She rolled onto her back, pulling Laris over her again. ‘Touch me,’ she sighed, straining against her.

Laris watched her, stroked her hair, kissed her brow, her nose, her lips. ‘Yeah? Tell me,’ she said, quiet and intent, ‘tell me what you want.’ She shifted, pressed her thigh against her cunt, moved against her, slowly, maddeningly slowly, and Beverly arched into her, whimpered, grasped for words. ‘Tell me, Beverly,’ Laris whispered against her ear.

‘ _Touch me_ ,’ Beverly pleaded, with all the inarticulate urgency she felt. ‘I want—,’ but she was so dazed with want it felt impossible to say. ‘Your hand on my cunt, Laris, Jesus, fuck,’ she finally managed. Laris laughed at her, and moaned at the same time, a ridiculous splutter that made Beverly laugh, too, laugh and groan in intense frustration, and they were both completely helpless for a moment. ‘Are you gonna fuck me, or what?’ Beverly found herself saying, and snapped her mouth shut exactly one horrified second too late.

But Laris only laughed again, a delicious, satisfied, enchanted laugh, low in her throat, and wound her hand right down between Beverly’s legs. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I am. Tell me what’s good,’ she said, and sighed the sigh that Beverly knew well as the sigh of what it feels like to find a lover wet under your touch.

‘Firm and slow,’ Beverly said, setting her a rhythm with the movement of her hips. ‘Just your fingers sort of either side — yes, _yes_ , like that, yes, a little harder, yes,’ and almost involuntarily she started to move faster, press harder into her hand.

Laris held her tightly, watched her closely, adapted to her, followed her, caught her, overtook her, and soon it was Laris setting her rhythm, Laris guiding her where she wanted to go, moving with her, all lit up with effort and a bright praiseful smile, teasing her with kisses, the sweep of her tongue and the sweet burn of her teeth, and ‘Fuck, you’re perfect, Beverly, you’re perfect.’

‘Inside, I want you inside,’ Beverly pleaded between rough, wet kisses, and her whole body responded to Laris’s answering whimper, to the way Laris pressed herself against her. Her earnest look of concentration made Beverly laugh again, laugh helplessly as Laris found her entrance with one soft, careful fingertip.

‘What?’ Laris spluttered, laughing too. ‘Is this…?’

‘God, perfect,’ Beverly said, pressing into her touch, so promising, just that pressure, that anticipation. She kissed her. ‘Please,’ she sighed, and Laris pushed inside, so careful, and she felt herself clench around it, and tipped her head back and closed her eyes and focused on the exquisite, not remotely satisfying tease of Laris moving searchingly inside her. ‘More,’ she demanded before she could think about it, and Laris moaned and kissed her deeply. She pulled back, pushed in again, two fingers, long, deep strokes, and Beverly strained into her hand with a wanting sob. And it still wasn’t really enough, but it was Laris— _Laris_ , deep inside her, Laris’s beautiful, strong fingers moving inside her, Laris’s weight securing her in place, Laris’s rough kisses and the smell of Laris’s sweat, ‘ _Laris_ , Laris…’

‘More?’ Laris asked with a hungry grin, like she knew the answer, and Beverly nodded, clutching at her, growing frantic, struggling to speak, and when Laris pressed back into her again, three fingers deep and tight and hot, they moaned together. She moved slowly at first, biting her lip, looking intently down at her, her hand wound tightly in her hair. ‘Is that…?’

‘ _Yes_ ,’ Beverly moaned, ‘god, yes.’

‘Good,’ Laris said, moving a little faster, then a little more, filling her up, holding her down. Beverly whimpered and clutched her, arching into the stretch, the sweet burn that spread through every part of her. ‘Perfect, Beverly, you’re—you’re fucking perfect, I would—I want to—anything, whatever you want, everything you want, everything, anything,’ and then she kissed her, sloppily, like she needed it, and Beverly whined and clutched her, moved with her, rose and fell with her.

‘So good,’ she panted, ‘you feel so good, Laris, _Laris_ , I’m—fuck, I’m going to—fuck me, _harder_ , Laris, fuck me, fuck me,’ and Laris whined, pressing into her harder and still harder, and then she couldn’t form words anymore, couldn’t speak, but she could drive her hips harder, faster, as hard and fast as she could, and tear at Laris’s mouth with her teeth and sink her nails into her back and let herself cry out, long, desperate, wordless cries.

‘Oh, fuck, _Beverly_ ,’ Laris moaned, ragged with effort and pulling her hair hard and like it was just as good for her, and that was it—that was it—she shouted, clutched at Laris, pressed as hard as she could into her hand, and wave after wave crashed over her, shuddering, violent, almost too much to bear.

‘Laris,’ she panted, still moving, pressing hard against her, ‘fuck, Laris, Laris,’ whimpering, incoherent, as Laris moved with her, rode her through it, pulled every last pulse of it out of her and didn’t stop until she slumped and swallowed and laid her hand over Laris’s, sticky and warm. ‘Stay,’ she breathed, covering her eyes with her other arm, ‘just for a—just stay.’ Laris eased herself down alongside her, leaning over her, and held her, and kissed her, her wrist and her jaw and her lips, three fingers deep inside her still, never releasing that firm safe grip on her cunt.

She was a long time surfacing, and when at last she tapped Laris’s wrist and said ‘Okay,’ and sobbed at the extremity of what she felt like pulling out, and finally managed to drop her arm and open her eyes and look at her, and saw her bright-eyed smile, she thought she’d do absolutely anything in the world to see it again, and again. She reached to splay her fingers across that smile, and realized she was smiling too, bewildered and besotted.

‘Jesus fucking Christ, Laris,’ she breathed at last, and Laris laughed.

‘Yeah?’

‘Fuck. Yeah.’

‘Good,’ Laris said with a smug little grin, nipping at Beverly’s hand. Flushed and sweaty, hair all mussed and lips kissed dark and swollen, she looked good enough to eat.

‘What do you need?’ Beverly whispered, slurred but in earnest.

‘Hah,’ Laris breathed, ‘not much, I can tell you that.’

‘Show me,’ Beverly said, and she took Beverly’s hand and guided it between her legs, pressed it tight against her vulva, wet and warm, and, resting her forehead against Beverly’s, began to move, slowly grinding down against her.

‘Just like this?’ Beverly asked, holding her tightly, moving with her, still tender, oversensitive, but needing her.

‘ _Ohh_ ,’ Laris sighed. ‘ _Yes_.’ Beverly clasped her by the back of the neck and kissed her, losing herself to what she felt like, what she looked like, how she moved, the sounds she made. So wet— _so_ wet—and so responsive, so sensitive to every twitch of Beverly’s fingers, she buried her face in Beverly’s shoulder, relinquishing all semblance of control. Her voice came now in ragged grunts and groans, her hips stuttered, her grip on Beverly’s neck, Beverly’s shoulder, was rough and desperate; there was no performance in it, nothing left for show, just raw desire aching toward its climax. And she was right—it wasn’t long at all before she clutched at Beverly’s hair and whined Beverly’s name and with a keening wail snapped her hips down hard and came, an ungoverned jerk of limbs and a rush of pulses against Beverly’s hand, gasping and twitching, til slowly she subsided down into Beverly’s arms, still whimpering, breathing hard. Beverly held her, kissed her shoulder, rocked her, murmuring, ‘You’re incredible, Laris, you’re incredible.’ The weight of her; the smell of her; the fact of her: here, now, this woman, in her arms. Incredible, as in, difficult to believe.

‘Computer,’ Laris groaned, shifting sluggishly. ‘Water. Cold.’ She pushed herself up with a wonky grin, gave Beverly a clumsy kiss, and stumbled to the replicator. She stood leaning against the post at the foot of the bed for a moment, drinking deep and catching her breath.

‘Do you have any idea what you look like?’ Beverly said with a helpless gesture. Her hair all wild disorder, stark naked and flushed all over… It was challenging indeed to believe that any of this was real.

‘Some idea, sure.’ Laris gave a cocky smile and held her pose a moment longer. Then she climbed back into bed, straddling Beverly’s lap, and offered her the glass. Very beautiful, very real. Beverly drank gratefully, watching Laris’s expression grow thoughtful as she toyed with the ends of Beverly’s hair.

‘So. That happened,’ Laris said, with a blurt of a laugh.

Beverly snorted. ‘Yes, I’d say so.’

Laris laid her hands flat against Beverly’s chest, swept them up over her shoulders, pensive, considering. ‘I’m not sure I ever really expected it to.’

‘No?’

She shook her head. ‘Wanted it, wanted you, yes,’ she said, with a soft smile, punctuating with taps of her index finger on Beverly’s chest. ‘Hoped you wanted me, yes. Wondered what it might be like, what _you_ might be like, imagined it, _fantasized_ , yes,’ she went on, a little wickedly, leaning in to kiss her. Beverly made a mental note to return to that very interesting line of inquiry at a later date. ‘But I never really expected… or, I suppose I never thought as far as this. Now. What happens next.’

‘And now that we’re here?’

Laris raised her eyes to meet Beverly’s and gave a helpless little shrug. ‘Not the slightest notion.’

Beverly set the water glass aside, and took both of Laris’s hands in hers. ‘Is here a place you want to be?’ It plainly was; the whole posture of her said so.

‘ _Yes_ ,’ she said, as if perplexed even to have been asked.

Beverly drew her hands to her lips. ‘So let’s just be here, for now, and next will be… next, and then another next after that. And then we’ll find out. Yeah?’

Laris’s lopsided smile was all she wanted. ‘Yeah,’ she said, and scooted herself down to lie in the crook of Beverly’s arm, her head on her shoulder, one hand splayed across her sternum. ‘Yeah.’ She toed Beverly’s ankle, stroked along her ribs with the knuckles of her inside hand. ‘Do you want—can I…’ she started, sounding sweetly sheepish. ‘Can I sleep here with you tonight?’

Beverly laughed. ‘You’d better!’ she said.

Laris raised her head to look at her. ‘Is that—does the one thing really imply the other, for you?’ _You people_ , she meant. ‘I thought that might just be a holo trope.’

The image of Laris sat with a holoprojector trying to puzzle out what was real and what was melodrama in depictions of human mating rituals was too much for Beverly to accept with a straight face.

‘Sorry,’ she said. Laris had asked an honest question. ‘Well, I — no, actually, it doesn’t. It’s contextual. But in this case, yes, I’d have been surprised if you got up and said goodnight and left me here alone. Not that—I mean, if you wanted to, of course I wouldn’t begrudge you that, but I’m happier that you want to stay.’ Time with Laris was beginning to accustom her to the thrill of saying aloud what she might have been inclined to leave assumed.

‘Good to know,’ Laris said, unfazed, nuzzling closer, her nose tucked under Beverly’s chin. Beverly wrapped her arms around her and kissed her precious head. She suddenly had a lot of questions about bedsharing in Romulan culture, but Laris had already gone heavy in her arms.

‘Computer, lights,’ Beverly whispered, and when nothing happened, remembered to stretch for the lamp switch. Laris woke and shifted sleepily against her when she yanked the duvet out from under them, but nestled into her again as she pulled it warm around them.

Nowhere near sleep herself, Beverly settled in to enjoy the tender feeling of Laris’s weight, her warmth, the rhythm of her breathing, the periodic twitch of her fingers or her foot, and wondered what difference it made to her, to share a bed, what it meant, what it would mean.


	5. Chapter 5

Beverly woke to find Laris splayed across the bed, still sleeping beside her, gorgeous in the morning light—and found, too, that she had been edged onto a sliver of mattress perilously narrow. Not for the first time. Nearly every morning, in fact, for nearly three weeks. ‘Like a bloody housecat,’ Beverly muttered, nudging her way back into a more humane position. Laris made an indignant noise at this injustice, and subsided again when Beverly laid a hand on her back. She propped herself on an elbow, the better to admire her sprawled across the sheets in the sun that poured down through the skylight above the bed. ‘Bed’ being a loose term for what was essentially a mattress on the floor; there was a word for it in Romulan—Rihannsu—but Beverly maintained it was a mattress on the floor. But there was something about this spare space that Laris had made her own, its wide bare floor, the prints of abstract geometric sketches on the walls, and all that light. And Laris in the middle of it, like one of those old French paintings about bodies and bedding, all the curves and creases of her outlined against the chiaroscuro field of the rumpled sheets.

It was one thing to discover one of those rare people whose every interest, every insight, every gesture made you giddy to learn more, to experience that wild lust for the friendship of one specific individual; it was one thing to thirst so hard for someone physically that it made you incapable of ordinary speech, to be so enchanted by the embodiment of another that you felt it always in your own skin. It was a third thing still when those two things combined. But what Beverly had found with Laris in these weeks was a whole other universe of things.

Each day, almost each time they touched, they found some kind of revelation. Some were cultural: Laris had gone almost to pieces the first time Beverly drew her fingertips into her mouth, shaking with some transgressive thrill she never managed to entirely explain, yet found it thoroughly surprising when Beverly suggested that the use of restraints was a thing that called for some discussion in advance. She felt perfectly comfortable printing sex toys from the kitchen replicator, reading specs aloud in a tone as banal as if she were searching for drill bits, but almost passed out from shock when Beverly unceremoniously stripped naked on the riverbank for a spontaneous midday swim. 

And some were visceral. Beverly had to make an effort not to show her disappointment when she understood that for Laris, being fucked with a strap-on was a categorical no-go—but when she saw what Laris looked like _wearing one_ , her entire understanding of the world turned inside-out. She’d never wanted so badly or so immediately to get on her knees for anyone. She’d never responded to a firm ‘Bend over.’ with anything but evening-ending laughter; she’d never begged the way she loved to hear a lover beg; she’d never thought she’d ever want another to decide for her how she’d be touched. 

She was used to being on the more aggressive, more adventurous side of any pair or trio, and very used to taking charge—Will had called her ‘The Director’, back when he and she and Deanna had been a thing—and she had not at all expected the way Laris responded to her slightest submissive gesture to work on her the way it did. The way just sighing and relaxing into any touch could dial Laris up to panting; the way her arched back or a pretty whimper or a well-timed ‘ _Harder_ ’ made Laris moan, and clutch her, and go to any effort to satisfy her desire. So far, so any such performance could be fun with the right partner, but when through it Beverly found her way into the space where she could sink for real into Laris’s control, found that radical giving-over where her whole world became what she was made by Laris’s desire—that was not a place she’d ever been. It was as though Laris had, just by being who she was, unlocked a door that Beverly had never even known was there.

It made it all the sweeter, all the sharper, when Laris went pliant and all-over needy, when she asked wide-eyed for some tender sort of care, when she begged. The way she first strained and then subsided, sighing, when Beverly pulled her hair, or gripped her throat; how much she loved, loved, loved to be tied down. How she and her wry, daring smile would wrestle against restraint, against demand, until some touch, some scrape of teeth or smack of palm pushed her past some limit, and she cried out, and her taunts turned all to desperation. It tested Beverly’s trust in her own strength; the extremity of what she felt when Laris trembled in her arms must be, she thought, the outermost boundary of her capacity. But then, something else would happen; two, three orgasms down, raw and tender, Laris would reach clumsily for her and ask in a hoarse voice for more, and Beverly found that her capacity grew and grew. 

And it had, indeed, turned out that Laris liked to have her ears touched, kissed, licked, bitten, that it made her purr or moan or yelp accordingly, and that she loved to bask in Beverly’s enchantment with this and every other part of her—right up to the point when it suddenly became too much, and her eyes flashed and she grinned her wild grin and pinned Beverly with a devouring intention of her own. That constant contest, the ongoing wrestle that grew and changed and developed between them day by day like a rough choreography of wanting, became a thrill like few that Beverly had ever known.

Now, in the sunsoaked bed, when Beverly kissed her shoulder, Laris stirred and, as she did most mornings, startled. She relaxed when Beverly wrapped herself around her, arm along her arm, legs crossed over hers. ‘Mmmh,’ she smiled, gaining greater consciousness. She pressed contentedly back against Beverly, warm and sleep-soft, and took her hand from where it lay across her sternum to press it to her lips. Beverly kissed her neck, the triangle of freckles just below her ear, and she hummed. 

‘Morning,’ she mumbled, and craned around to kiss her, then swatted her clumsily. ‘Brush your teeth, you barbarian,’ she complained. 

Beverly laughed. ‘What does that make you?’

‘In my defense, I’ve been unconscious. Go.’ 

Beverly laughed again, and obeyed. After Laris took her own turn, she brought steaming mugs from the replicator, set them carefully down on the floor, and then a slight misjudgement of her playful tumble back into the bed landed her hard on Beverly’s left hip. 

‘ _Aaaah,_ careful!’ Beverly hissed against the pain that shot from her hip all the way up her torso. 

‘Fuck, shit, sorry,’ Laris said, rolling to give her space.

‘Not your fault,’ Beverly corrected, slowly easing her leg into a more bearable position. ‘It’s just stiff, and just a little too much weight in just the wrong spot— _agh_ , fuck.’ 

‘Here,’ Laris said, moving to kneel between her knees. ‘Let me.’ One hand under her calf, the other bracing her thigh, Laris took the weight of her leg, firm and very gentle, and slowly offered by careful pull and pressure some suggestion of how to move it. ‘Relax,’ she said, ‘give me all the weight.’ She knew what she was doing. 

‘You think it’s easy to relax with your hand on my thigh?’ Beverly joked through a ragged breath, trying to comply.

‘Hush. Deep breaths, drink your coffee, and let me do the work.’ It was, in fact, easy to relax with Laris holding on to her like this, or easier. To give her the work to do, breathing carefully, finding and releasing each small site of tension, of withheld control, the slow relinquishing of the unconscious clench that was every muscle’s instinct.

‘How do you know how do to this? Where did you learn?’ There was more to it than trust and instinct, a fair bit more. 

Laris only smirked. It was a look Beverly had come up against often enough, over the years. An innocuous question, more often than not, in the midst of an innocuous conversation, and there it would be: the black box, the past that never opened. Perhaps the question of what could be unspeakable about a skill in manipulating human flesh and bone was something Beverly really ought not to think about at all. Or maybe it was, in fact, entirely innocuous. However it was, in the gentle push and pull of Laris’s confident hands, the long stretches, the slow rotations, the pain began to ease, and Beverly breathed easier as it did. She watched it register on Laris’s face, a quiet, satisfied smile.

‘What happened?’ she asked softly, letting the leg down slowly and shifting to work a deep, slow massage into the muscle. ‘If it’s all right for me to ask.’ 

‘Oh, god, that’s good,’ Beverly breathed. As for the question, she was only surprised Laris hadn’t asked her sooner. ‘I was shot,’ she said plainly, reaching for her coffee. 

Laris blinked. ‘By what?’

‘Breen disruptor. Just winged me, or…’ She gestured. That would have been that.

Laris’s eyes widened, and her grip tightened. ‘Lucky.’ 

She sipped her coffee, raising her eyebrows in agreement. ‘I was. But also very much without about a third of my pelvis and my entire hip joint.’ Not to mention flesh and muscle. She flinched. It was the kind of thing you were grateful not to remember. ‘Reconstruction is getting more and more routine, but there’s not much you can do about the basic fact that bone and muscle take time to get to know each other, to learn to understand what you want them to do.’

‘When did it happen?’ All her playfulness had gone. 

‘This summer. During a failed peacekeeping mission to a Klingon colony, near the border. It was probably in the news here; the Breen have been making bolder and bolder incursions.’

‘It was, but… I didn’t think you saw much combat,’ Laris said, slowly, her hands stilling around Beverly’s thigh, a cautious, protective hold. Funny, Beverly thought. She wouldn’t have expected her to be squeamish about a bit of crossfire.

‘I don’t, really, relatively speaking, but all med ships see front line service sometimes. Comes with the territory.’ Beverly rolled her hip experimentally. ‘God, that’s so much better,’ she sighed, and set her mug aside. ‘Thank you. Come here.’ Laris obligingly crawled into her arms, warm and heavy, careful of her left side. ‘You feel so good.’ Laris didn’t say anything, just kissed her slowly, soberly, so earnestly. 

Beverly gathered her close in both arms, and rolled her onto her back, gratified by the expected sigh as Laris relaxed under the pressure of her weight. She returned those languid kisses til she felt Laris’s body begin to respond a little more intensely, til she felt her hum against her lips and hold her just a little tighter.

‘How can I spoil you?’ Beverly asked, raking her nails suggestively along Laris’s thigh, with another sweet, long kiss.

Laris whimpered, and her kiss grew a little desperate. ‘Your mouth,’ she said, unhesitating, and Beverly felt it like a hot weight in her cunt. 

‘You got it,’ she breathed. She lingered for a moment, holding her down, kissing her, teasing her with the tip of her tongue along her upper lip, an implicit promise. ‘Can I take my time with you?’ She thought she could be content drawing out that tease forever. 

But Laris shook her head with an almost plaintive urgency and said, ‘I don’t want to wait,’ and that was as good as anything Beverly could ever wish for. She kissed her once more and without further ado slipped down her body to settle between her legs, hooked her arms around her thighs and laid a soft, caressing kiss directly on her clit. Laris gasped, gathered Beverly’s hair and held it, one hand firm on the back of her head, and laid back and sighed, and Beverly moaned into the taste of her. 

She found a pleasure that was the inverse of a tease in her new confidence in knowing how to make this woman come as urgently as she’d been asked to; how she liked soft supple kisses, closing carefully around her clit, and when she wanted something sharper: teeth, and pressure. Just how far she wanted to be pushed, and then eased down, and then pushed hard again. How the taste of her changed when she was close, and how as she began to lose control she’d grab for Beverly’s hand and hold it, her bone-crushing grip and the hard yank on Beverly’s hair when she shouted, tensed, subsided—and then the slow release. 

And how she liked to be caressed, after. Beverly kissed her thigh, rested her head there, and breathed with her, sweeping her palm across her belly, laying a hand across her cunt, stroking her thumb slowly up and down along the slick contours of her. 

And then the moment when her breath caught, and her hips twitched, and her hand grasped again for Beverly’s. Beverly smiled and met her eye and pressed her thumb slowly, questioningly, against her clit, and raised her eyebrows. Laris squeezed her hand and nodded with a half-shy, lip-biting smile, and she settled in again. 

Now, she could take her time.

* * *

They came down the stairs together laughing, and found Zhaban studying the comm panel in the kitchen, looking rather grave. 

‘Good timing,’ he said. He didn’t so much as smirk at their flagrant late-morning dishevelment. ‘Bev, you’ve got a priority-one from Command.’

Beverly winced, heart sinking fast. It was two a.m. in San Francisco. ‘Any clue what it’s about? Who it is?’

‘No; I’m not authorized even to take the call. Drama queens.’ 

‘Maybe they want to send us a fruit basket?’ Beverly wondered briefly what would happen if she just took Laris back to bed and pretended she’d never received the call. ‘All right. All right, I need to take this in private— _actually_ in private,’ she added, looking emphatically at Laris, who held up her hands protestingly. ‘I’m not kidding. I’ll be in the study. Shouldn’t be long.’

Sliding into Jean-Luc’s chair, she raked her fingers through her hair, did up her buttons to the collar, sat up straight, and hoped she didn’t look too much like someone who’d spent her morning eating pussy. She keyed in her authorization, passed the voice screening and retinal analysis, answered the codeword bot, and was patched through. 

Well, if it wasn’t the angel of death. 

‘Admiral Nechayev! Pleasure as always,’ Beverly said with a forced smile. Alynna didn’t buy it; she never did. And she didn’t have anything at all nice to say. 

She took a moment to gather her wits before returning to the kitchen. She found Laris hunched over the island, wringing a tea towel in her hands, Zhaban hovering protectively. They both looked urgently at her when she came back in. 

‘Not great news,’ she said. 

Laris drew a sharp breath. ‘It’s not,’ she started, voice tight. ‘It’s not Picard?’

‘Oh, god, no—I’m sorry, no, I didn’t even think—it’s nothing like that. No, an epidemic at the research colony on Tau Ceti III—it’s an enclosed facility, massive, but enclosed, so an airborne virus will be catastrophic.’ Laris had an abashed look, like she felt guilty for being relieved. Zhaban rubbed her back. Beverly wished she could step into that scene, but she steeled herself. ‘The _Peseshet_ has been assigned to lead the relief effort. I’m due aboard—well, immediately. As soon as possible.’ 

Laris stared at her. ‘What? For how long?’ 

‘Don't know. It will probably take weeks to get the situation stabilized, then depending on what kind of quarantine’s appropriate…. And if they want me to stay for rehabilitation….’ She shrugged. It was impossible to say, this early, how something like this would unfold.

‘It sounds dangerous.’

‘It is. Casualties are already—’

‘No, I mean, for you. For whoever they send.’ 

‘I—yes.’

‘What about your leave?’

‘It’s over. Well, suspended. I need to send some messages and pack a few things, and then I need to go.’ It was unendurable, the stricken look on Laris’s face. ‘I’m sorry. Laris, I’m sorry. I wish we had more time. But I really need to go.’ She turned to Zhaban. ‘I can ask Alyssa to send a shuttle, but I think it would be faster to fly to Carcassonne and transport directly aboard from there, do you think you could…?’

Zhaban nodded. ‘Of course. But the transporter operators are on strike. Again. We’ll take you to Blagnac, you can get a shuttle there, still save a few hours.’

Laris glared at him and flung her arm across his chest as though to hold him back. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, hang on, what do you mean? You’re really just going? Now? Just like that?’ Zhaban laid a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged him off. 

Beverly hadn’t thought this would be easy, but she’d been severely underprepared for the force of Laris’s response. ‘Laris, I’m sorry, but I have to—’

‘They can just cancel your leave like that? Call you up at a moment’s notice?’ All incomprehension, Laris raised these objections as though the decision were not already made, and Beverly didn’t know how to find the wherewithal to explain, in the face of her wounded bewilderment, that everything she was saying was moot.

‘Well, no, not officially. But I’m the ranking medical commander in the sector, I have extensive experience in triage on a population scale, and management of emergencies in Federation colonies requires high-level security clearance. For a start.’

That lit a whole new fire in Laris’s eyes. ‘Sorry—sorry, are you saying that you _volunteered_?’ 

‘I—yes.’ Not that Alynna would have taken no for an answer. But it also hadn’t occurred to Beverly to try.

‘You’re kidding.’

‘I’m not.’ 

Laris looked disbelievingly from her to Zhaban and back again. ‘Does Starfleet have no other medical personnel with rank, experience, and clearance? Is there some reason you, specifically, must be the one to do this?’

‘… No.’ Beverly clasped her hands, massaged her palms, to hold back the sharp reply, to keep from losing her temper. ‘But the _Peseshet_ is the flagship of the medical fleet, and she’s my ship. Her crew is my crew and I am their captain. She’s fresh out of dry dock and ready to go. Assigning her was the right call, and hell if I’m letting her go without me.’ 

Laris scoffed. ‘Oh, please, you Starfleet people and your duty this and service that—you’re not irreplaceable. You have choices, don’t you?’

‘What’s gotten into you?’ It was almost impossible to believe that not fifteen minutes gone, Laris had been that languid gorgeous thing luxuriating in the sun. ‘Fine. Okay, fine. I have choices. But to rephrase your question: why should someone else do this instead of me? Why should I be off the hook and someone else at risk? Anyway. Laris, that’s not the point—the point is, it’s not—oh, for Christ’s sake, there’s no time for this! It’s not abstract, Laris! People are dying! And if I don’t do this, if I don’t—if I don’t _serve_ , if I don’t put what I know to use to help people—. Fine. Roll your eyes. You think I’m naïve. That’s fine. But if I don’t work in the service of something necessary, well, I just can’t live with myself.’ 

‘Is there no—’ Laris began, shouting, then cut herself off, breathed deeply, and started again, in a more subdued, more even, and much more unsettling tone. ‘Is there no end to work, and duty, and obligation? Does no one here ever say, that’s enough, does no one _retire_?’ Her voice rose again. ‘Does Starfleet extort a blood indenture from you to be served until death? Or are you just constitutionally incapable of staying the fuck in one place?’ 

‘ _Retire_?’ Absurd. This was absurd. She had to _go_. ‘What are you—sorry, Laris, sorry, are _you_ retired? Stalking around like a caged cat, arming the place like a fortress? Running your own little DIY intelligence operation and maintaining the training regimen of an active-duty soldier? Is that Tal Shiar for _retirement_?’ Beverly saw Zhaban’s shoulders tense, saw him step instinctively closer to Laris, and Beverly balked at having crossed that line, but she was too wound up to back down now.

‘This—!’ Laris gestured helplessly. ‘This is the only condition by which I am able to live my life! This is the only place where I’—she reached for Zhaban behind her—‘where _we_ can be safe, and only by maintaining vigilance can I _keep_ us safe. Only here, and only like this, can I even live at all, but beyond that, yes, I hope! I hope I make choices, I hope I choose such as I can, yes!’ Laris glared at her a moment, then exhaled heavily and bowed her head, leaning against the counter and hiding her face in her arms. She muttered something inaudible. 

‘What was that?’ Beverly snapped. 

Laris raised her head slowly and met Beverly’s eye. ‘I said, why is it that I seem to be forever having to beg you people to stay?’ Her exhausted tone of defeat punctured Beverly’s anger like a balloon.

‘Oh, Laris…’ Beverly knew, suddenly, what Jean-Luc must have been feeling when he left her his message, those weeks ago. ‘Laris.’ She took a step toward her, but the look in Laris’s eyes was forbidding. ‘Damn it,’ she said softly. ‘I—. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about losing this time together and I’m sorry that it’s such short notice and that there’s so much risk involved, but—well.’ She didn’t know what else she could say. She spread her hands helplessly. ‘This… is the condition by which I am able to live my life.’ 

Laris’s reaction to that was bodily; she took it like a blow to the solar plexus. She stared incredulously at Beverly, then shook her head, tossed the tea towel at the counter, and walked out without looking back.

‘ _Laris_!’ Beverly called after her, but she neither turned nor stopped. She looked to Zhaban, who just gave her a short raised-eyebrow shrug and followed after.

* * *

Only he was waiting in the flier when Beverly arrived with her things. He shook his head before she could ask.

She sighed, sliding into the passenger seat. ‘I thought she might’ve cooled down.’ He glanced askance at her. ‘You know how she can…’

‘It’s true,’ Zhaban conceded. ‘Laris has her fleeting passions. But this is not one of them.’ He met her eye. ‘She’s very angry, Beverly.’ He spoke evenly, and he closed the hatch and keyed in his authorization as calmly and deliberately as he did everything, but the chill in his tone was unmistakable.

‘So angry she won’t speak to me? Won’t say goodbye? _Why_ —why, when—?’ The look he gave her was so baleful, so utterly full to the brim with how-stupid-can-you-possibly-be that it shut her right up. It had occurred to her, in her defense, that stupid was too good a word for a woman who thought it appropriate to compare her career pursuing her life’s vocation on her own terms to the narrow-bounded patch of refuge that an exile from a dead planet was holding together with her bare hands. Too late, by a good margin, but it had occurred to her. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I wish I hadn’t said those things and I’ll tell her so if she’ll let me, but I really can’t stay, Zhaban, do _you_ understand that?’

‘I do. But I also don’t blame her for being angry. Not just angry. Frightened. In a way I haven’t seen in a long time.’ He held her gaze a moment. ‘First him, now you. What do you expect?’ Then he turned toward the console and pretended to be intensely focused on the launch controls. That, plainly, would be that.

‘The picture of loyalty, you are, Zhaban.’ It was petty and snide to say it like that, but at bottom she meant it. Around the edges of all the raw unwanted feeling, she took some comfort from knowing that she was leaving Laris with someone who—well, someone who would never leave her. ‘Shit,’ she muttered, and lay back in her seat to endure the hard silence of the twenty-six minutes to the spaceport at Blagnac.


	6. Chapter 6

In fourteen years, Laris hadn’t gotten used to the exposed feeling of being alone in public in human cities. Carcassonne couldn’t quite be called a backwater, but it was no metropole, and there was no mistaking her for local. The cold gave her an excuse to tug one of Zhaban’s silly knitted hats over her ears, and she’d pulled up the vast hood of Picard’s ancient fisherman’s jacket over that. She was wearing one of his old cabled cashmere jumpers, too. Both were absurdly large on her, but that only made her feel better covered. And they smelled of him, which felt safe, too. And most importantly, in this seemingly eternal February that kept all signs of spring at bay, they were warm. She hopped in place, warming her hands with her breath, and then observed that none of the humans seemed to think that eleven degrees of centigrade was all that cold, and tried to be still. This was why she never came to town if she could help it. Zhaban, poor sod, had tried to take this one for her, but she couldn’t live with not doing it herself. 

‘Bonjour, Laris!’ came a voice, and she snapped into awareness.

‘Salut, monsieur!’ she called, cheerfully enough, when she identified the body belonging to the voice: the old greengrocer, Benoît something? Feyroux. He stocked their wines. A grandfatherly, harmless soul. She pushed back her hood as a concession to politeness.

‘Fait froid, eh?’ he asked with a twinkling smile. He was only wearing a light tweed jacket and a cap, and didn’t look cold at all.

‘Pour moi, oui, assez froid!’ She exaggerated a shiver. She knew her role. There was comfort in that.

‘Ah, la pauvre,’ he said, mocking but kindly. ‘Ça va, chez vous?’

‘Ouais, ça va, ça va, et vous?’

‘Très bien, mademoiselle! On va bientôt vous demander encore quelques caisses de la clairette, elle s’en vole!’ He mimed the silly little bird wings he did every time. What made her feel so comforted by some of these old men calling her _mademoiselle_ like that—never mind that she was almost certainly older than all of them, in absolute if not relative terms—but coming from some others it only made her want to shank them on the spot? She smiled warmly, in any case, at this one.

‘Ah, génial, merci, je dirai à Zhaban,’ she promised. ‘Ça lui fera grand plaisir.’

‘Bien! Bon! Alors! Dites-lui bonjour de ma part!’

‘Et à madame!’

‘Au revoir!’

‘Au revoir!’

It wasn’t so terrible, to be seen. The reassurance she drew from the idea that any observer of her exchange with Feyroux would have taken it as evidence of her belonging—that being seen, she was seen to be innocuous—was not, she knew, an innocent feeling. Just good tradecraft, she thought bitterly, and realized she was bouncing on the balls of her feet again. She focused on the transporters, the intermittent waves of travelers—the series of faces illuminating with recognition, waving to someone in the crowd; the brisk, officious commuters, hurrying on without looking up from their padds; the social groups reforming seamlessly, resuming conversation wherever they’d left off before their atoms were dispersed; the unforgivables who materialized and then stopped dead directly in front of the transport pad. None of them was her one.

She’d had a long letter from Beverly very soon after she’d left. It hadn’t said the one thing Laris had wanted to hear—that she was right, and Beverly had changed her mind, and was coming back, and would never leave again, for any reason, ever—so she had let it go a long time unreplied-to. Close on its heels had been a call from Picard, miraculously whole, looking more himself than he had in years—but he too had only wanted to say that he was not coming home. Though that had not, of course, been the word he used. She had not handled it well. Sometime around the turn of the year, Zhaban had calmly but firmly informed her that she had, in fact, become impossible to live with. His gentle way of dressing her down had been so funny that it shook a little sense into her. She’d sent a short vid message to Beverly saying she was sorry, and she missed her, and happy new year, and other things that weren’t enough, trying to demonstrate a level of rationality that might persuade Beverly to see her as a person and not a crazy box of assorted live explosives. Not long after, they’d received a message addressed to both of them saying Beverly would be handing over command of the operation if it reached its four-month benchmarks, and hoping she could return to the vineyard to resume her extended leave. Laris had hovered like a bat over Zhaban’s shoulder, micromanaging his reply, until he’d lifted her up bodily and deposited her on the sofa with a kiss on her forehead and the implicit reminder that she could at any time choose to cop herself on and write to Beverly herself.

She had not, in the intervening time, copped herself on.

So the least she could do was to turn up in person to meet her. She realized she was hopping in place again, and stopped, just as her eyes resolved the crowd around the transporters down to one single figure. In a long camel coat and the same dark slacks and turtleneck she always wore to travel, all long sharp lines, with her startling hair in a careless twist and her bright lipstick and shades, Beverly looked like something out of a glossy fashion holozine. Laris was suddenly acutely, horribly aware of what she herself must look like, a little goblin in outsized patchy clothes, jumping up and down in the cold. She snatched the hat off and raked a hand through her hair, waving for Beverly to find her in the crowd. When she finally caught her eye, and watched her face illuminate, she abruptly ceased to care what she looked like.

‘Hi,’ Beverly said a little breathlessly as she drew near, watching her as though trying to gauge how to approach her.

Overwhelmed by her open smile, her bright hopeful eyes, Laris tried to reply, failed, hesitated, felt like a complete idiot, and finally, decisively, grabbed her into a fierce hug. 

‘Oh,’ Beverly sighed, relaxing into Laris’s arms, holding her tight, pressing a kiss to her head. ‘Thank you for coming.’ 

Laris pulled back to look up at her. ‘Yeah,’ she said inanely, feeling her cheeks heat. Beverly reached to push a stray curl back behind Laris’s ear, and her hand lingered there as she appeared to consider something. Then she kissed her, soft and easy, and Laris couldn’t help melting into it. ‘Really?’ she said, in an inanity competition with herself, and Beverly laughed. 

‘Come on, I’m sick to death of being in transit.’ 

Right. She took Beverly’s bag, for something to do, and led the way to the landing zone.

Laris was still examining the pressure lock on the hatch, which as Zhaban had reminded her twenty or thirty times could ‘sometimes go a little fiddly,’ not that that was anything to worry about at eight thousand metres, when she felt a sharp tug on her coat.

She turned to find Beverly looking up at her from the passenger seat, biting her lip, looking nervy and a little hungry, too. ‘Computer,’ Beverly said. ‘Set viewports to maximum opacity.’ And pulled Laris abruptly down into her lap. ‘I missed you,’ she breathed, as the daylight faded and the dim glow of the cabin safety lights came on, and kissed Laris so warmly, so completely, that for a moment it was almost as if nothing at all had passed between them since that sun-soaked morning in Laris’s bed at the vineyard. ‘Lights, half,’ Beverly said, gazing at her like she was a thing of wonder. ‘I want to see you properly.’ And then, with hardly a change of tone, ‘Can you forgive me?’

‘I—what?’ Some part of Laris was still back in the plaza, processing the moment when Beverly first looked at her and smiled. She was very, very far from understanding what was happening in the present. ‘Forgive _you?_ ’ Laris was pretty sure she was the arsehole who had thrown a temper tantrum and then gone radio silent for months.

Beverly traced the lines of her face with her fingertips, looking at her like she was trying to memorize her every feature. ‘For how I left things with you, the things I said—Laris, I—did you ever read my letter?’

‘How you—yes, I did, I—but did you—all right.’ She bit down on her lip to stop herself talking utter shite, and took a deep, rattling breath. She needed to reread that letter, apparently. ‘All right. There’s a lot to say here, clearly, but—’

‘Later?’ Beverly said, with so much yearning in her voice.

‘Later,’ Laris whispered, and had no time for any further thought. Beverly’s mouth against hers, pliant and warm and beseeching, and Beverly’s hands on her waist, against her skin, rucking up her jumper, Beverly’s hair coming undone in her hands, Beverly’s voice and the softness of her skin and all the smells of her, were all so far beyond where Laris’s most ardent, foolhardy hopes had led her that she could scarcely cope. There was a horrible moment when she realized she couldn’t stop herself tearing up, couldn’t swallow the sob of relief that blindsided her, but Beverly just kept kissing her, touching her, holding her.

‘I missed you,’ Beverly kept saying. ‘I missed you so much, and when I didn’t hear from you, I thought… oh, god, I just missed you.’ 

Laris could only whimper, whimper and press herself closer and shrug out of her ridiculous coat and kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her. 

Beverly snaked her hand under Laris’s jumper, under her bra, and palmed her bare breast, swiped her thumb ungently across her nipple, and the sound Laris made then—she really, really hoped that hatch was sealed properly. 

Beverly stilled. ‘Good?’

‘ _Yes_.’ Laris kissed her hungrily. ‘Fuck, yes. Please don’t stop, please…’ Beverly made a desperate sound and gripped her tightly. Beverly’s mouth rough on hers, palm rough on her breast, Beverly’s arm around her waist holding her just as bruisingly as she needed, Laris whined and pressed into every movement. ‘Please…’ she couldn’t stop saying. Beverly shoved her jumper up and Laris skinned out of it, and Beverly pressed her mouth, hard and warm and wet, against her breast through the thin cotton band of her bra. 

‘God, I want you,’ Beverly growled, ‘ _Laris_ ,’ kisses growing clumsy across her breasts, her clavicle, her neck. ‘I want you, I want—I want to touch you,’ she said, a hot breath against Laris’s ear. ‘Can I—’

Laris was already unfastening her belt. ‘Please,’ she moaned against Beverly’s mouth, ‘please,’ and Beverly _whined_. ‘Fuck,’ Laris panted, rising awkwardly so Beverly could jerk her jeans down just far enough to get a hand in her knickers and—‘ _fuck_ , fuck, fuck, Beverly, Beverly, _Beverly_.’ She gripped the seat behind Beverly with one hand, fisted the other in Beverly’s hair, and gave herself over to riding the press of her fingers, sliding slick along her cunt. 

Just minutes from the cold fear that this woman would never want to touch her again, she was near enough to coming in her hand in a public parking lot—and the thought made her laugh; her head tipping back, Beverly’s mouth against her throat, Beverly’s incoherent voice vibrating through her clavicle, Beverly’s hand firm against her back, holding her up, she laughed and drove her hips hard and fast, and shouted as it hit her, as her whole body tensed, tensed and clung to Beverly, til she sank down into her lap and collapsed against her, panting, spent, and overwhelmed.

‘Laris,’ Beverly whispered, easing her down. ‘Oh, Laris…’ She kissed her cheek, her brow, her temple, her ear. ‘Laris,’ she kept saying, and wrapped both arms tight around her.

‘ _Fuck’s sake_ , Bev.’ Laris slowly summoned the power to push herself upright. Her limbs were like sandbags, her mouth felt bruised, her cunt was still twitching, and every thought felt like a momentous effort of will. ‘ _Fuck_.’ 

Beverly laughed and thumbed her lip. ‘Good?’

Laris huffed a laugh, nipping at her thumb. She tugged stupidly at Beverly’s lapels. ‘Here, how are you still wearing your coat? Fuck. Yes. Good, yeah, that’s one word. Yeah, I’d say… hah, I’d say that was good. What can… what can I do for you?’ she slurred, hooking her fingers in Beverly’s collar, dragging it down her exquisite throat. She wanted to devour her. As soon as she recovered basic motor control. ‘What would you like?’ 

‘I’ve got what I want,’ Beverly said, with a stupid grin.

‘Mmph,’ Laris sighed, kissing her lazily. ‘Fine, I can wait.’ She lost some time just sitting there in her lap staring at her, just studying her face and running her hands through her hair. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’ There was so much more to say. She wondered how she would find it all.

‘Me too.’ Beverly kissed her once more, then patted her hip. ‘Now take me home.’ _Home_.

Oh, shit. ‘…Ohhh, shit.’ Laris laughed a deranged, rueful laugh, and scrubbed both hands over her face. ‘I can’t believe I have to fly after that.’

‘Want me to?’ Beverly’s grin was terrifying. 

‘Oh, absolutely fucking not.’ She’d racked up so many traffic violations that the Federation would no longer license her for atmospheric flight. ‘Computer,’ Laris groaned, standing up and hiking up her jeans. ‘Raktajino, double strong.’ She scrutinized the hatch again and finally just gave it a good hard kick. It’d have to do. She wriggled back into her jumper, took her raktajino from the replicator, slid into the pilot’s seat and keyed in her codes. She took a deep breath, kissed her fingertips and pressed them to her brow for luck, and shot Beverly a nervy grin. ‘Buckle up, babe, this is gonna be a rough one.’

Beverly snorted, and by the time the ground fell away from them, they’d fallen into a shared delirium of laughter that Laris felt in her heart like the first breath of spring.


	7. Chapter 7

But the weather didn’t turn, and the hard slate sky gave no sign of any change to come. There was work enough on the vineyard, accelerating toward the growing season—the focused, physical work that Laris loved of trimming vines, repairing trellises, that combination of mud and sweat with fine handcraft. The satisfaction of measurable progress. She’d come a long way, from Yuyat Beta.

And indoors, it was bright enough. Beverly was there to greet her every morning after her run, and they slept together most nights—that funny human double meaning of sex and bedmatehood together. And in between they worked. It felt almost routine. On Zhaban’s birthday—well, the day they had decided, their first year on Earth, to celebrate as his birthday—she and Beverly had taken over the kitchen, and they’d moved easily together, working around each other, dancing, laughing, kissing as they cooked, almost as though they’d always been doing it. And Sami and Béa had come round, and Francine and Max and a few of their crowd, and they’d all stayed up late drinking, laughing, playing card games, wearing stupid hats. It was all bright enough.

Now Beverly dozed beside her, sprawled on her back, naked, perfect, her hair fanned all around her, bright against the rose-colored sheets, and Laris sat awake and stared up through the skylight above her bed at the blackness outside and felt pressing close against her the heavy empty shape these past days had formed themselves around.

That first night, she had apologized, and so had Beverly, for being so uncareful of each other. They’d exchanged promises to proceed with more patience. But, dazed with relief and starved for each other, that was as far as they had gotten. Laris was not naïve enough to think the thing resolved, but neither was she brave enough to press the conversation toward what would resolve it. These days were stolen time, perhaps, but now, watching Beverly stir, watching her open her eyes and smile at her and reach for her so unselfconsciously, Laris simply could not bring herself to find the means to make time honest.

‘Hello,’ she said, smiling down at her, brushing her hair back from her shoulder, raking her nails across the spot that made her shiver and purr. 

‘Mm, hi. Is it late?’ Beverly murmured, nuzzling her hip. 

‘Just eleven or so, I think,’ she said. ‘You sleep, if you like.’ 

‘Nah.’ She kissed Laris’s thigh, gave it a swift playful nip, and Laris yelped. ‘You’re too interesting.’

Laris laughed. ‘Interesting?’

‘Yeah,’ Beverly grinned against her skin, sleepy and absurd. 

‘I’ll show you interesting,’ Laris said, rolling her over, pinning her hands. ‘Stay there,’ she ordered, and kissed her way down her neck, and Beverly laughed and immediately disobeyed, winding her hands in Laris’s hair. ‘Oi!’ Laris objected, grinning up at her. She rolled her eyes with another laugh and crossed her arms above her head. Good enough. Laris shook her head and carried on, kissing down her body, then sat back on her knees to just look at her, all golden and gorgeous in the lamplight. 

With reverent fingertips, she traced the shape of Beverly’s hip, strong and healed now, and then, unable to resist, shifted to set her mouth to it. Beverly gasped and twitched when she dragged her teeth along the curve of bone, and again when she bit into the tissue-soft skin there, that patch just the slightest shade paler, just a little less freckled than the rest of her. She wrapped an arm around Beverly’s thigh, spread her hand across Beverly’s belly, and lingered there, seeking out each sensitive place, each gasp and tremor. She smiled and hummed against her skin as she slowly teased her from her sleepy languor into the urgency of arousal, until she could feel her need in the tension of her muscles, hear it in the hitch of her breath, until she could _smell_ it. She pressed her mouth adoringly into her hip, thinking of the joint beneath, the miracle of its newness—then she saw in a flash the disruptor blast, the stomach-turning moment when flesh turned to void, and closed her eyes and bowed her head. 

‘Laris…’ Beverly sighed, tilting her hips. ‘Please…’ How sweet that word was in her voice. 

And Laris wanted to, she wanted to so badly it hurt, she was half mad on the look of her and the scent of her and she wanted the taste of her too, she was everything she wanted, but in her head the shot kept firing, over and over, her heart pounded and her lungs constricted, and she couldn’t. She couldn't. She laid a gentle hand across her cunt and kissed the inside of her thigh. ‘I can’t,’ she breathed, and sat up with enormous effort. ‘Beverly, I’m sorry, I can’t.’ It was a struggle to meet her eye.

‘It’s all right,’ Beverly said, right away, catching on, catching her breath, reaching for her. She took her hand. ‘C’mere,’ she said, and pulled her down to lie against her. She let her just lie there a moment, held her and let her lie in her arms, finding her breath, finding her way back, til gradually some of the tension washed out of her. Then she kissed her, softly, slowly, looked at her so tenderly, brushing her hair back. ‘Okay?’

‘Yeah.’ Laris put on a smile, running her fingers through Beverly’s hair, tracing the outline of her ear. ‘Just being stupid,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’ The shot kept firing, but more slowly now, further away, fading.

Beverly shook her head, dismissing the apology. ‘Did something—did I—’

‘No, no,’ she said, and stroked her hand along her side, over her hip, and back again. ‘Such a lovely shape you are,’ she murmured absently. ‘This,’ she said, swiping her thumb back and forth across the place where the fresh-healed patch met more weathered skin. ‘This is such a miracle. But sometimes I can’t help getting stuck on how you came by it. Don’t—I’m sorry, it’s all right. Feck’s sake, it’s _your_ injury.’ She’d have given anything in that moment to be less ridiculous. ‘I just got a little knocked off course, is all.’

Beverly’s mouth twisted into a pensive little moue, and it was no longer an effort to smile at her. For all that cheekbone drama, those striking eyes, that sharp-jawed glamour of a bygone era, she could also be just appallingly cute. Laris touched a fingertip to her lips, enjoying her in her sweetness; Beverly kissed her fingers automatically. But when she spoke she was deadly serious. ‘It really is a problem for you, how dangerous my work can be. Isn’t it.’ 

Laris huffed a laugh. ‘My life would be easier if everyone would stay in a neat little circle where I can defend them at all times, yes.’ Zhaban had more than once compared her to Francine’s sheepdog Nougatine, who was happiest when everyone was in one room, where she could count them regularly, circling to nose them each in turn. The analogy was not, Laris had to admit, unjust.

‘You know I can’t retire.’ Beverly paused. ‘No. That I won’t. And I have no desire to settle permanently anywhere.’ 

‘No,’ Laris said, struggling to catch up. ‘Wait. What? I’d never—I was joking!’

‘I mean what you said in the fall. Before I left.’

Ah. The empty shape. That the inevitability, the real necessity of returning to it had not escaped her didn’t make her heart sink any less. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, too quickly. ‘I didn’t mean any of that. I wasn’t actually asking you to—I would never ask you for that. I don’t _want_ that.’ 

‘What then? What did you—was it just about him? Jean-Luc?’

‘Yes. I don’t know. Probably. It certainly wasn’t about you. I’m so—. Ah, fuck.’ She shook her head and moved a little back from Beverly, the better to look her in the eye. ‘All right,’ she said, laying a hand over Beverly’s. ‘If we’re going to do this, let’s do it.’ She sighed and closed her eyes and steeled herself. ‘I’m not asking you to stay forever—to leave your post, or settle here. I’d never ask you for that.’ In spite of everything, she couldn't help chuckling. ‘Can you imagine? We’d both go mad.’ Beverly’s smile answered her own: she looked relieved. Grateful. She thumbed Beverly’s knuckles and shook her head. ‘No, I’d never ask you for that. I just... hate being left behind,’ she managed at last, a heavy confessional sigh.

‘You feel trapped here,’ Beverly suggested, turning her hand under Laris’s to hold it. Probing like this was a clinical examination, a diagnostic problem to be solved. Her way of taking it seriously, Laris supposed, but still, the scrutiny was hard to bear.

‘No,’ she said. Strangely enough, she never had. ‘Not exactly. Not trapped. Very safe here, actually. Just powerless everywhere else.’ She exhaled very deliberately. ‘Here I have some certainty. I know, for one thing, where my guns are.’ She smiled in an attempt to acknowledge her own absurdity, but still Beverly’s look was grave. ‘And I like to know where my people are, too. And…’ There was also the other thing, the thing too large to say.

Beverly combed her fingers through Laris’s hair, thumbed her ear. ‘And you’ve lost an awful lot,’ she supplied. Uncanny, how she could do that. Like that assessing gaze could scan the insides of her. ‘I can understand wanting to hold on to what you can. Or, I don’t know if I understand it. But I can see it.’

‘I do want to hold on to you,’ Laris said. She sniffed. ‘Ah, feck.’ She blinked and took a breath. ‘But not in a way that means you can’t live your life. I just…’ she sighed. Here was another place she did not want to go. ‘I’m just frightened, Beverly. I’m just _frightened_. I’m frightened, I’m scared, I’m just scared all the time. I never used to be. Before, I mean.’ She gestured. The end of the world, the thing too large to say. ‘I got scared, somehow, and I don’t know how to get unscared.’ She’d never said it quite that way before, quite so baldly, quite so desperately.

‘What scares you?’ Beverly asked, and Laris wondered what it would take to discompose that collected, even-toned physician’s manner. 

‘Anything outside the boundaries of this property?’ She laughed darkly, but Beverly didn’t share it. ‘This is it,’ she said, gesturing. ‘This is what I’ve got. My patch. What I can keep safe. So when someone like Picard, or Zhaban, or—well, you, gets beyond the bounds of what I can anticipate and prevent and react to, it’s… hah,’ she shook her head and sniffed, blinking rapidly. ‘It’s just—it’s a little hard to let go.’ 

‘You mean when you can’t capture us on your feeds?’ Beverly’s tone had sharpened just a little, and it took Laris a moment to understand why.

‘I don’t want to _surveil_ you, Beverly,’ she said with a sudden deep horror. 

‘No?’

‘No!’ The very idea was abhorrent. ‘Is that another of your soap-opera-Romulan ideas? Or is it what you really think of me?’

‘What then?’ Beverly asked placidly.

‘A feeling—like—it sounds so ridiculous to say that I want to protect you. As though you need protecting! As though you would tolerate it. But that’s what it is.’ She was still so chilled by the surveillance concept. ‘Beverly, please, I don’t want you to think—I don’t want to _watch_ you, I don’t want to control what you do or know anything you don’t want me to know. It’s not like that.’

‘Okay,’ Beverly said, laying a hand gently over hers. ‘I believe you. What is it you want to protect me from, then?’

Laris laughed. ‘Feck’s sake, it’s not _rational_ , Beverly.’ _Literally everything_ was not a rational answer. She did know that. Literally everything was, in fact, a potential threat, one way or another. But that this was true did not make it a sane thing to say. ‘I don’t know. It is all, for a certainty, very selfish. Beverly, I’m—’

But Beverly waved her off. ‘No, I want to understand. And it doesn’t have to be selfish. There’s ground we have in common, here.’ To Laris’s questioning look, she replied with a soft caress across her cheek. ‘Jean-Luc, for example. I miss him, too, you know. We haven’t talked about it.’

‘No.’ It startled her, that generosity. That openness. That will to find a place to stand together. What on earth had Laris done to deserve it? 

‘He—before I came down,’ Beverly said, ‘in the fall, the message he left me? He promised that—god, I feel so stupid.’ She blinked rapidly, took a breath. ‘He said, in so many words, that once he’d done what he set out to do out there, all his time would be mine. Now? I get letters, calls, punctually enough, but…’ She gestured to the obvious absence, there in the house. 

‘The man needs an intervention,’ Laris muttered bitterly. Beverly didn’t laugh, but then, she didn’t either. 

‘We could share that, is my point.’ 

‘Yeah.’ 

‘It doesn’t have to be something you fear from me.’ There was no reply to make to that that Laris could get past the lump in her throat, so she just shook her head. Beverly drummed her fingertips on the back of Laris’s hand. ‘Do you remember what I said in that letter I wrote to you, about my work?’

‘Which part?’ Laris really was going to have to reread that letter. 

‘Did you even read it?’

‘Yes.’ That was true. Strictly speaking. ‘… Not very well. I’m sorry.’ 

‘You should reread that letter.’ 

She winced. ‘I know.’ 

‘I wondered, anyhow—if you knew more about my work, if we talked about it more, if you saw that part of me more clearly, if it wouldn’t make this easier.’ 

‘It might. But it’s not… it’s not rational,’ she said again, and sighed. ‘But in my defense, it’s not entirely irrational, either. Do you know how many ways there are to die in space? Stupid question. Of course you know. But do you have _any_ idea what it’s like for the people you leave behind?’ 

Beverly stared at her, pulling back from her slowly, eyes slowly widening. When she spoke she was most certainly discomposed. ‘Can you _really_ be asking me—’ Laris stopped her with a hand on her arm.

‘No. I’m sorry.’ Stupid, stupid question. ‘Strike that from the record, please.’ She squeezed her arm. ‘I am sorry,’ she said, and Beverly exhaled and nodded. ‘But it does seem to me there’s something… different, at stake. Picard is out there, but you’re going back out there, too. He might be someplace where you can’t reach him, but you’re someplace, too. I’m just… here.’ She laughed. ‘Stalking around like a caged cat.’ 

Beverly winced. ‘I do regret that, Laris,’ she said, with an emphatic grip on her hand. 

‘Which is good to hear, but you weren’t wrong.’ She held Beverly’s hand tightly, wondering just what she was clinging to.

‘You’re not wrong, either. But I wasn’t thinking of Jean-Luc.’ Beverly grew very still, very quiet, then at length looked at her with a kind of abstracted perplexity. ‘Do you not—don’t you know how I lost my husband, Wesley’s father?’ 

Her what.

‘Your—. What? I—no. I didn’t know he was dead. I don’t think I knew. I don’t think I even knew you were married. What… oh, shit.’ She made a concerted effort to shut up, hiding her face in her hands. Idiot. Idiot! Some selfish part of her was stuck on _husband_ , stuck on the magnitude of what she suddenly understood she didn’t know. ‘I’m so sorry, Beverly.’

‘It’s all right,’ Beverly said, abstractedly. ‘Oh, this is strange. This is so strange!’ She fell back on her pillow and raked both hands through her hair with a wide-eyed look of stunned disorientation. ‘I think,’ she said, her voice gone high and quiet, ‘I think you’re the first person I’ve ever been close to who didn’t know me first as Jack’s widow. Or, at least, didn’t know the story first.’ She stared up at the ceiling for a moment, then mimed a brain explosion. ‘Well, _that’ll_ give me something to take to therapy,’ she said, laughing. If jokes were on the table, things might be all right. 

‘I get that a lot,’ Laris ventured.

Beverly snorted, swatted her hip. ‘God. You really didn’t know?’ Laris shook her head. ‘I guess it’s somehow just never come up—did you think Wesley had no other parent? And Jean-Luc really never mentioned it?’ Laris shook her head again. ‘God. _God_.’

‘You don’t have to tell me, Beverly, it’s not—’

‘Oh, it’s not that. I want to; I want you to know, and I don’t mind talking about it. It’s just... very strange.’ She made a dismissive gesture, and spoke matter-of-factly: ‘Jack served under Jean-Luc, on the _Stargazer_. Before the _Enterprise_. I was serving on a starbase; Wesley was small, and we wanted him to have a stable home. Jack was killed on an away mission.’ Laris had a mindblown moment of her own; she’d always known there was something ancient and deeply fraught between Beverly and Picard, but this was an order of magnitude beyond what she’d imagined. ‘There’s a little more to it than that, but it doesn’t matter. Jean-Luc always carried a lot of guilt about it,’ Beverly went on. ‘It stood between us for a long time. I never understood that, really. Until I was given the _Peseshet_ ; then I got it. If our positions had been reversed I don’t know that I would have coped terribly well with it either. Anyway, it was a very—hah, _very_ —long time ago, but the point is, I do have some idea what it’s like.’ She said it all so plainly. So gently.

‘I’m so sorry, Beverly. I must have seemed so—I’m so sorry.’ Beverly shook her head, but Laris felt suddenly so small, so naïve. So self-centered—as if no one but her was carrying around losses impossible to fathom. And so far away from Beverly, who suddenly seemed half a stranger. If Wesley had been little when it happened—she did some arithmetic. Beverly must have been very, very young. It was hard to imagine that girl. Rounder-cheeked and smoother-skinned and—she’d seen photos—flame-haired. But trying to bring the image into focus didn’t tell her what she wanted to know. And it was such an enormous thing not to know. She didn’t know how she could not know it; it was true she had no wish, ever, to surveil her friends, that was to her an unimaginable violation, but before these people, Picard’s people, ever _were_ her friends, she’d done her due diligence. Hadn’t she? It was impossible that she could be so misinformed about something so significant. She didn’t know how to catch up with the apparent fact that she was missing so many pieces of this woman who lay so frankly, so openly, so beautifully naked beside her. 

She reached for her hand again. ‘I’d like—.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’d like to hear about him, sometime.’ 

Beverly turned back toward her, propped herself on an elbow and looked down at her. Suddenly it was like she was fully present again. Laris held very still. ‘Sometime,’ Beverly said softly, and leaned down to kiss her. ‘Thank you.’ And, laying a hand on her sternum, she kept on kissing her. Finally she rested her forehead against Laris's. ‘How can you be so precious to me?’ 

What a thing to say, to someone who had been so careless. Laris laughed—it was that or burst into tears—and palmed her cheek and kissed her til she could recover thought. 

Beverly thumbed her cheekbone, looked at her with a kind of wonder in her eyes, and repeated her question, with emphasis: ‘I mean _how_ can you possibly be so precious to me?’

Laris had a sudden fear of what might lie behind the question. ‘You mean given what we don’t know about each other?’ 

‘That and… I don’t know. I didn’t expect this.’ 

For an evil moment, Laris thought about asking her to define what she meant by ‘this’, but she let it go. There was, after all, an undeniable this-ness to this. ‘Neither did I,’ she said instead. 

‘Do you think you can tolerate it?’ Beverly said, with an almost painful gentleness. ‘Me spending most of my time out there?’

 _Of course_ , Laris wanted to say. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. I really just simply do not know.’ She lay back, looking up through the skylight at the stars, the satellites streaking across the sky. Felt the vertigo of knowing what distances, what unfathomable emptinesses lay beyond the illusion of that pin-pricked black curtain of sky. 

‘I can’t find the solution here,’ Beverly said softly.

‘The solution, Beverly, is that I cop myself the fuck on.’ She felt flushed, felt that sort of metallic anxiety in her throat, and wanted it gone. She wanted this over. She wanted to stop thinking. She wanted _Beverly_. She was far past ready to get to the part where Beverly pushed her over and held her down and they could forget all this for a while. 

‘Well,’ Beverly said thoughtfully, fingering an end of Laris’s hair. ‘You could come with me.’ 

‘Wouldn’t that be hilarious.’ But Beverly just arched her eyebrows. ‘You’re not serious? _Me_ , on a Starfleet ship? Yeah, I don’t think so, mate.’ 

‘Why not? I don’t mean permanently, but for one mission, to start? We commission civilian researchers all the time; there’s lots to do that would interest you. Or, you wouldn’t even need a commission, you could do whatever you wanted, work on your own projects. I’m entitled to have… family, aboard. It’s a good ship, a good crew…’ 

Was she mad? Had she gone _completely_ mad? 

‘Beverly.’ An alarm began to sound in Laris’s head. She ignored it. ‘I don’t want to live in space, for a start, and I don’t want to leave Zhaban, or the vineyard—this is my home, do you understand that? I don’t want to follow you around like a lost puppy, and frankly I don’t much care for the assumption that I _would_ want to.’ 

‘Laris…’ Beverly looked decidedly taken aback. 

The alarm grew louder. She’d hurt her, she knew it, she carried on anyway. ‘No. Setting—setting all of that aside, aside from,’ she gestured shakily, ‘ _any of this_ , I need you to get one thing very clear in your head: _I will never, ever work for Starfleet_. And if you ask me why, I tell you what, the rest of this conversation is gonna be well and truly fucking moot.’ She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, trying to breathe through the shaking rage that had suddenly enveloped her. 

Beverly at least had the grace and good sense to look seriously abashed. ‘I’m sorry. I got ahead of myself. That was thoughtless, it was—’

‘Yes, you did. Yes, it was,’ Laris spat. ‘And then some.’ Her face was hot, and she was struggling to keep her voice down. She thumped her knuckles against her forehead, as though it could drum out the roar of what she did not want to think or feel. She tried to breathe, tried to backtrack to wherever they’d taken a wrong turn, but it was all she could do just to keep from shouting. ‘Fuck,’ was all she could think to say, wincing hard.

‘You hate the idea of me in that uniform,’ Beverly said very slowly, very quietly. ‘That’s part of it, isn’t it. Part of why—’ 

‘ _Yes_ ,’ Laris gasped before she had time to think about it. She sat up, struggling to get air into her lungs. Now that the thought had got in she didn’t see how she could get it out. She propped her elbows on her knees, bowed her head in her hands, curled her fingers tight in her hair, and tried to breathe. She had never actually seen Beverly literally in uniform. She had never, she now realized, so much as allowed herself to imagine it. It was suddenly too horrible to contemplate. She looked at her now, so pink and human, naked in her bed, and she seemed so foreign, such a stranger. She flinched violently when Beverly tried to lay a hand on her back, and Beverly recoiled, startled. Hurt. Laris stared at her, trying to make her familiar again. She couldn’t resolve her into anything she recognized. Had she just been fooling herself all this time? Had she just been delusional? Had she just been pretending _all this time_ that she wasn’t straightforwardly, literally, in bed with the enemy? She felt sick, suddenly, and like her skin was too tight and too hot, and there wasn’t enough air in the room. ‘I need,’ she struggled to say. 

‘I’ll give you some space,’ Beverly said, moving to get up.

‘No, no, stay, don’t. I’ll just. Just give me.’ She vaulted out of the bed and tossed on some knickers and a jumper. ‘Just…’ she said, holding her hands up, and fled.

* * *

In the dark kitchen, Laris wrapped her hands around a glass of water and laid her forehead down on the cool granite of the counter, trying to breathe. The dog had heard her coming down, and followed; he sat next to her, pressed against her leg, quiet and alert. 

She could see the outsides of it, now; she had no idea how to get there, but she could see the outsides of it. She tried not to think about Beverly stranded alone in her room, in her bed. She tried not to think about Beverly at all. She was just here, in the kitchen, in the house that she had lived in for fifteen years, with the cool glass in her hands and the cool granite under her forehead. The constriction started to abate, but then the awful thing, the horrible inchoate torrent of whatever the fuck, rushed over her again like a lava flow, fast and hot. She squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth and tried to swallow the whine that wanted out of her throat and gripped the glass so hard she was afraid it would break. Part of her wanted it to. She did her best to breathe. It would pass, she knew it would pass. And it did, slowly. 

She heard a step in the corridor, and the series of puttery sounds that followed it let her know that it was Zhaban and that he wanted her to know where he was. 

‘My heart,’ he called softly to her in Rihannsu, which meant it must look pretty bad. She tried to lift her head but only made it as far as resting it in her hands. ‘Would you like me to leave you your space?’ he asked, and she shook her head violently. She heard him circle around to stand on the opposite side of the island to her. He wouldn’t come closer til she wanted him to. She let out a long, shuddering breath. 

‘I’m all right, e’lev,’ she managed, and he didn’t laugh at her, which also seemed like not a good sign. 

He laid his hands out open-palmed on the counter, and she let hers fall into them. He sat quietly while she found her breath again. ‘Did something happen?’ he asked. So gentle and undemanding. How could a man be so gentle and undemanding. 

‘No. I don’t know.’ She rocked back on her heels, let out another rattling breath, and managed, finally, to look at him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and it scared her all over again, and made it horrible to look at him, him and his kindness. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

‘It’s all right,’ he said in his gentle, even, soothing tone. ‘It’s all right, you don’t have to know.’ He went on like that for a while, just murmuring, and she focused on his voice. ‘Can I come and be next to you?’ he asked eventually, and she nodded.

Just his shape was a comfort. He stood close with a broad, firm hand on her back for a long while, and when she was able to push herself fully upright, he wrapped his arms around her, and the dog lay down at their feet. He held her, and stroked her hair, and she leaned into the warmth of him.

‘What happened, sahe’legge?’ he asked again. 

The flash of that image she had had of Beverly in uniform set her skin ablaze all over again, shortened her breath all over again. She tried to breathe through it but it overtook her, she shook in his arms, she couldn’t see the outsides anymore, didn’t understand why this was happening, couldn’t escape from it, and—‘She’s a Starfleet operative, Zhaban!’ she blurted. ‘… Officer. Officer.’ It was so much worse, saying it aloud. ‘Oh, I’m so naïve. I’m so stupid. So stupid! I’ve just been pretending all this time and none of it has been real, none of it, I’m so naïve, I’m _so_ naïve!’

She felt him sigh. ‘Oh, my heart,’ was all he said at first. And then, ‘What makes you think it hasn’t been real? Do you think Beverly has deceived you?’

‘She’s _Starfleet_ ,’ Laris said again. Why couldn’t she find the way to say what that meant? Why couldn’t he see it?

‘They aren’t the enemy anymore. Beverly isn’t.’ He sounded so sure. ‘They were never the enemy we were taught they were. We aren’t there anymore, my heart. Not anymore.’

‘That’s not what I’m—that’s not—’ Why couldn’t she say it? She wanted to scream, she wanted to hit him, she wanted to shatter something, and she shook with the force of trying to hold it all back, trying desperately to set her back against it and keep it at bay, keep it from overwhelming her, but on it rushed, the horrible thing, like a lava flow, like a great wave of combustion, like a star exploding. ‘ _They destroyed our people,_ Zhaban! Our civilization! They destroyed our people, our culture, just as surely as the most rabid, paranoid, lunatic propagandists ever said they would! They destroyed our people, and she just gets up and goes to work for them! With a clear conscience! And she—she—she’s a _Starfleet operative_ and she was in my _bed_ , I _wanted her_ , I _still_ want her, she didn’t even have to deceive me, I just _trusted_ her and the whole time she—’ but the image of Beverly so lovely and golden in the lamplight, the thought of Beverly’s lips, Beverly’s hands, was too, too horrible. ‘I’m so naïve,’ she said again, and something deep down in her finally cracked, and she sobbed, and fell against him, and finally, finally, came a flood of tears, and she surrendered to it.

And Zhaban held her. Rocking slowly, murmuring nonsense, stroking her back, held her and held her as she fisted her hands in his shirt and sobbed like a child. 

Time passed. How much, she was never able to judge. But she slowly became aware that she could breathe without choking, then a little easier, then easier still. And then she was aware of Zhaban again, and the dog, and the room, and how her throat hurt, and her eyes. Zhaban seemed aware of it too, somehow, and loosened his hold on her, just enough. Slowly, she unclenched her hands from their grip on his shirt. The crying was usually the last of the worst of it, and she could see that now too. She took a deep, heavy, shuddering breath, wiped her cheeks, sniffed somewhat disgustingly, and looked up at him. That fond smile, that unfathomable gentleness in his eyes. The simple gesture he had made she couldn’t possibly tell how many times, over the course of nearly a century, of tucking her hair back behind her ear. 

‘Fuck,’ she said. English was a good language, actually.

‘How’s it goin’?’ he asked, in such a normal tone that she couldn’t help but smile. 

‘Yeah, all right,’ she said. ‘You?’ He chuckled and kissed the parting of her hair, and she wondered how she could ever, ever deserve him. He reached for her water glass and put it in her hands, and she drank, and wiped her face with her sleeve, and just like that, the volume of the world seemed to have been turned down just a little, just enough. ‘I’m so sorry, e’lev.’ 

‘No,’ he said, still stroking her back. ‘Not ever.’ 

‘Ah, shit.’ She scrubbed the heel of her hand over her eyes. ‘Beverly.’ The thought was enough to make her skin go tight all over again.

Zhaban only nodded. ‘Yeah. Want me to check on her?’

‘Would you?’ she said with incalculable relief. 

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Can I get you anything, first?’

‘Fuck.’ English was a really good language. ‘ _Fuck_ , I need a drink.’ She wiped her eyes again. ‘And some air. Will you sit with me—?’ She gestured toward the terrace. 

‘Gladly.’ His tone was lighter than it had been. And he wouldn’t let her drink if he thought she was non compos. Maybe they were on the way out of the woods. ‘I’d been thinking of opening a bottle of the ’92 piquepoul…’

‘Tempting. But do you still have that kali-fal that Kimara sent us for Ashteth last year? I feel,’ she said sardonically, ‘like a taste of home.’ 

‘You mean you feel like having your face ripped off.’

‘Like I said. And what about those, what are they called, silly word, rolled tobacco things of yours—’

‘Cheroots?’

‘Those.’

‘I do. On both counts.’

‘Well?’

‘What are you offering?’ He smirked. Out of the woods.

She shoved him. ‘Shut up and get the booze and the smokes.’ 

‘Sure.’ He looked her up and down. ‘So do you want, like. Pants? Or…?’ His eyes sparkled, and she laughed at last for real.

‘A blanket will do, beloved.’ 

He bowed, and she smiled and sniffed. The tears weren’t done with her after all. But the volume turned itself down a little more. 

Zhaban delivered a bottle and a pair of snifters and a small wooden box and a lighter and a saucer-cum-ashtray to her on the terrace, and turned on the heat lamps, and tucked the heavy blanket from the study over her legs, and she felt extremely ridiculous for being so spoiled. But he smiled and tousled her hair, and laughed when she kicked him for calling her a princess. 

He went to find Beverly, and she tried very hard not to think about it.

The night was cool and clear, and curled up on the bench with something to smoke and a glass of something that would make paint thinner pass out if it got too close was exactly where she wanted to be. When Zhaban returned, she poured him a glass and lit a cheroot for him, and watched him anxiously. He was quiet for a while, his good humor subdued.

‘Well? How did she seem?’ she asked at last. He sighed.

‘Worried about you, mainly. Relieved that you’re okay. Slightly blindsided.’ He sat back and smoked in silence for a moment, swirling his glass absently, not drinking. ‘She loves you, Laris,’ he said eventually. ‘Try to remember what you know about her. Try to hold on to it.’

That just made her want to sob her guts out all over again, but the prospect seemed too exhausting. ‘Thank you,’ she said instead. It seemed so inadequate. 

‘It’s all real, sahe’legge,’ he said softly, laying a hand on her knee. ‘It’s all real.’ She leaned against him and sipped her kali-fal, relishing the feeling of her every facial nerve bursting into flames. She blinked against the burn, and laid her open hand in Zhaban’s lap. He took it in his without hesitation.

‘What the fuck am I going to do about this, e’lev?’ It had been a long time since the last one of these, or at least since the last one this bad, and smokes and booze and clear night air notwithstanding she knew it would be days before it was really over. She didn’t know if she could take all of that coming back in force again. And there was the problem of the woman upstairs she both ached to retreat to and was still, at some level, completely convinced she’d been severely compromised by. Being able to see the problem did not help at all with solving it.

‘Well, for a start,’ Zhaban said, ‘I think we should call Prema Rhyl in the morning.’ There had been a time when Laris would have bristled at that, a time when she _had_ bristled, and then some. But the thought of the wry, even-tempered Bajoran counselor and her lovely rooms overlooking the rose glow of Toulouse already made her feel more steady. She nodded.

‘Yeah, all right,’ she said. He squeezed her shoulder. Wise enough not to say he was proud of her. She took a pensive drag on her cheroot, blew a ring of smoke into the still, cool air. ‘But what if it’s not what we think?’ 

‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘The panic attacks?’

‘Yeah. What if it’s not something therapy can address?’ She leaned back and closed her eyes, gesturing with her cheroot. ‘Why this? Why now? Why _Beverly_? What if it’s not emotional damage, what if it’s just… brainwashing, like? How do I know? How do I know there isn’t some kind of sleeper signal implanted in my brain that, I don’t know, takes over if it detects disloyalty?’

‘Laris…’ Zhaban said, in the tone he used when he thought she was crossing too deep into conspiracyland.

She sat up and turned to face him. ‘Would you put it past them?’ she said, sipping her kali-fal with a hiss. 

‘In terms of intent? Of course not. In terms of capability, very much yes.’ To think, he’d once been the true believer.

‘Why?’ She poked him in the shoulder. ‘How confident are you that every thought you have is your own? Think about how much we held to be absolute, foundational, that turned out to be complete and utter bollocks, and tell me that you are confident in your judgement, your understanding, your common sense. Your morality, even. Tell me you always know for sure what’s real and what is not.’ 

‘I don’t. But I don’t think it’s because there’s a literal foreign entity in my brain. But… Okay. Ultimately, practically. _If_ it were a—whatever you think it is. Bug. Sleeper signal. Whatever. If it were, what difference would it make?’

‘The hell do you mean, what difference would it make?!’

‘Look. If it’s a Tal Shiar brain bug, which, let me say again, I do not believe is a real thing, what does it do?’ He dangled his cheroot from the corner of his mouth, the better to enumerate evidence on his fingers. ‘It sometimes causes you to believe, temporarily, things your rational mind would not conclude were true. It seems to be calibrated in some way to be set off by cognitive dissonance, or simply a sufficient level of doubt. Keywords, possibly, even. Images of certain kinds. It periodically causes you immense stress and anxiety, especially when you can’t reconcile your present life with our past lives, to the degree that it interferes with your ability to make free choices and influences your actions, beliefs, and relationships.’ He paused, puffed his cheroot, and reached to ash it, then met her eye. ‘Does this seem like an apt description?’ 

She rolled her eyes and blew a puff of smoke in his face. ‘Yes,’ she conceded.

‘So tell me, star of my soul most honored and cherished, if there were such a thing implanted in your mind, how it would differ, in practical terms, from good old-fashioned trauma.’

‘Like mama used to make?’ She couldn’t resist.

He snorted. ‘Yeah.’

She tipped her head back and groaned. ‘Fine,’ she said.

‘It can’t be easily extracted,’ he went on, ‘and it might be impossible ever to dig it all out, but with some help and some care, you can live with it. You _are_ living with it, Laris. For one thing, you’re sitting here with me in a garden on Earth, shit-talking Our True Mother, in _English_ ; do you think a Rihan bug that was controlling your mind would permit that?’

‘Point. Probably not. But … I would like to know what is real. Is all.’ She took a last hissing sip of pure distilled Imperial insanity, and one last drag on her cheroot, reaching to stub it out in the saucer. ‘Fuck.’ She curled up close against him, head on his chest, legs across his lap. ‘I _miss_ it, e’lev,’ she said in Rihannsu. She didn’t just mean the homeworld. ‘I miss it.’ His arms around her, his heart beating under her temple. The tears started up again, but they were more ordinary ones.

‘I know,’ he said. He did. They sat like that for a long time, until she realized she was beginning to doze.

She couldn’t face the idea of returning to her bed. ‘Can I stay with you tonight?’ she asked, looking up at him. 

‘Of course.’ He patted her hip. ‘You go on up; I’ll take care of this.’

‘Shit.’ She groaned. ‘The dog…’

‘On it. Go on. I won’t be long.’ 

She stood unsteadily, and turned to look at him. She placed her hands deliberately on either side of his face, stroked her thumbs across his beard. He smiled his soft, subtle smile. She bent to kiss his forehead. ‘Thank you, beloved,’ she whispered, hoping he understood how much more she meant than that. 

She was drifting when she felt his weight in the bed beside her, heard the dog clicking across the floor. ‘Goodnight, my heart,’ he said, settling close to her. She curled into a ball, tucked into the crook of his arm. The dog lay down against her back. Held between their two warm bodies, she fell into a deep, long sleep.


	8. Chapter 8

Laris woke feeling hollowed out, abstracted, and not just in the way that a double shot of kali-fal right before bed would make anyone feel. Zhaban wasn’t there, but the dog was, lying vigilantly next to the bed. When he heard her stir, he got up and laid his chin on the mattress, watching her intently til she laid a hand atop his head. 

She sat up slowly, and discovered that Zhaban had left her padd on the nightstand. She had a new message from him: ‘In the kitchen. Room service available upon request. N1 not been out, wouldn’t leave you.’ 

‘Silly boy,’ she said, scratching his ears. Though her blood had been transfused with lead and her nervous system taken a vacation without notice, she was not going to let Zhaban wait on her in bed. And it was nearly eight o’clock. ‘Up,’ she said to herself. ‘Up, up.’ 

Zhaban had folded last night’s jumper on his desk chair, and added to it fresh trousers and knickers and an undershirt. ‘Silly boy,’ she muttered, and dressed with much less difficulty than anticipated. 

She walked the dog a quick lap round the outside of the house, and came back by the kitchen door. Zhaban stood at the island, kneading dough. That was a good sign. Baking meant coping.

‘Morning,’ she said, and found her voice hoarse. But he heard her, and looked up, and gave her a soft smile. 

‘You’re up,’ he said, which she figured meant she looked like shit. 

‘I’m up,’ she agreed, not without regret, nuzzling his shoulder as she passed to the replicator to demand a raktajino. She held it to her nose and inhaled deeply as though she could mainline it to her brain. ‘Is she…’ she started, and trailed off.

Zhaban tilted his head toward the study. She nodded. ‘All right,’ she said. She didn’t think she could face her. She knew she had to. ‘All right,’ she said again, and started for the study.

‘Laris,’ he said tentatively, and she stopped and looked back at him. ‘Last night, when I found you here?’ She drew a sharp breath, nodded. ‘I came down because she knocked on my door to tell me she thought you needed checking on.’ 

Then she couldn’t breathe at all.

Mindful of his arms all flour to the elbow, Zhaban leaned into her. ‘Remember who she is, sahe’legge,’ he said. He kissed her hair. ‘Remember who you are.’ 

‘Feck,’ she said, with a shuddering exhale, and squeezed his arm, and kissed his shoulder. ‘Thank you, beloved,’ she said, and turned to make her way to face the thing she could not face.

Beverly sat at Picard’s desk, intensely focused on something she was typing. Her hair was bound in a ratty knot at the crown of her head; her eyes were drawn. She wore the oversized shirt she sometimes wore to sleep in, but she plainly hadn’t slept. It was a moment before she looked up and saw Laris standing there dumbly in the doorway, and when she did the way her expression first brightened, then withdrew, tugged at Laris’s heart. But Laris only half felt it, seeing as how she was standing two feet to the left of herself.

‘Zhaban,’ she started, then cleared her throat. ‘Zhaban told me I would find you here.’ 

‘I’d hoped you would.’ She looked like she wanted to say more but didn’t dare. _Have I done that to her?_ , Laris wondered abstractly. ‘How are you feeling?’

She huffed a dire laugh. ‘What did he tell you?’ she asked instead of answering.

‘Very little. He said you’d had a difficult night. I asked him if you were safe, and he said yes. I asked him if he thought I should leave, and he said not yet. I asked him if he thought you would want to speak to me, and he said he didn’t know. That’s all.’ She paused. ‘I want to better understand what happened, but if you don’t feel ready…’

‘I don’t know what I’m ready for.’ She might as well be frank; there was little left to lose. ‘I did have a… hah. A difficult night. How politic of him. It’s nothing that hasn’t happened before, but it has been a long time since I last had an … episode. Like that. Of that scale. I’m not entirely out of it, actually, and to be honest with you I don’t at the moment know entirely what is … real.’ She flexed her jaw to loosen it, and tried to breathe through the tight, numb feeling. ‘But he told me you were in here and I wanted to… not avoid you.’ She swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, Beverly. For lashing out. For—I am sorry.’ She gestured: that was the best she could do.

‘Thank you,’ Beverly said. Laris braced herself for some condescending shite, but Beverly just looked like she was trying to hold herself together. Or hold herself back. ‘I won’t ask you to get into it. You can tell me, or not, whenever.’

‘Thank you,’ Laris said. 

‘I think,’ Beverly took a deep breath, ‘that I should go, at least for a few days, give you some space. And me too. But you don’t have to respond to that yet.’ Good, because Laris didn’t know what to do with the fact that her response was both unspeakable relief and the feeling that a hole was opening inside her that would never close. ‘There’s something I want to say, first.’

‘All right.’ She thought she should say something more, but nothing came. She gestured to the armchair that stood opposite the desk. 

Beverly nodded. ‘Please,’ she said, overemphatically. 

Laris sat, folding her legs under her, and gripped her mug, and waited.

‘All right,’ Beverly said as though in reply to Laris’s silence. ‘Last night, once I realized you … weren’t coming back—it’s okay, don’t… you don’t have to say anything. I’m just trying to … lay this out. Once I realized... something serious had happened, I spent some time trying to put some of it together. What had so frightened or angered you. That moment, that whole conversation, and then also what happened in the fall. I was up all night thinking about it, and here is what seemed clear to me.’ She took a deep breath and paused as though Laris might say something. There was nothing. ‘Is this… I don’t want to speak for you.’

‘It’s all right.’ Not speaking for herself had a fair bit of appeal.

‘All right. Well. What seemed clear to me was that there is something fundamental, something irreducible, about a significant aspect of my life—of who I am—that is, for you, at least at present, traumatic. It seemed clear to me also that it would be profoundly unfair, if not cruel, to ask you to simply live with that. That you should be required to, as you put it, cop yourself on, while I should carry on exempt from any compromise. Not only unfair but in a way incorrect; this is not a failing in you, it is a dilemma between us. And so it seemed clear that if we were to continue to be… close, this dilemma must be resolved in some concrete way.’ She paused again. ‘Does all of that seem… fair? Right? To you?’

Laris nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said thickly. She thought so. Hovering outside herself, hearing Beverly’s voice as though through a PA in another room, she couldn’t be sure. Yet there was something reassuring in hearing this explained, as though understood. As though she were present, material, could be perceived. As though this thing that had happened had in fact happened, as though she and it were real and not imagined.

‘Okay. Good. So, finally,’ Beverly concluded, ‘it seemed clear to me that one solution to that dilemma would be for me to resign from Starfleet.’ She took a deep breath. ‘And what I wanted to say to you before I go is that that is something I am prepared to do.’

Of all the things Laris might have expected Beverly to say, that would not have made the list. It did not seem in any way plausible, and she felt her suspicion of it physically. But the Beverly Crusher she knew, the one she was pretty sure she knew, had never tried to guilt-trip her. That she was aware of. Had never, so far as she knew, bluffed her when the stakes were high. Still. It seemed extreme. ‘That… seems extreme,’ she said. ‘You were just saying yesterday that you can’t retire.’

‘I have no intention of retiring,’ Beverly said. ‘And I do not wish to settle permanently anywhere. Those things are not on the table. But I could leave Starfleet. That is.’ 

‘Just like that?’ 

‘No. I haven’t made any decisions. I’m just starting to do some work on… creating choices. That’s what I’ve been doing here, this morning. And I wanted you to know that. To see the practical possibility.’ She sounded so stilted. Like this was really costing her. Laris wondered what the cost was. Or would be.

‘You don’t expect me to believe that you’ve changed your position on Starfleet overnight? Because I had a panic attack?’ If this was an effort at manipulation, it was at least a pretty shit one. The Beverly she knew would be terrible at influence work.

‘No. And I haven’t. I don’t share your view of it. I am prepared to discuss that at length if you wish, and open to being persuaded to see things differently. I’m not naïve, or at least not as naïve as you sometimes think I am, and I’m certainly no loyalist. Starfleet is simply where I have been able to do what I am able to do in the world. I won’t pretend it hasn’t profoundly shaped my life, but it’s not the only place where I can do my work.’ She sounded like she’d been working those sentences over. Laris shifted, hugging her knees to her chest, sipping her raktajino, and wondered if the Beverly she knew would rehearse a speech like that.

‘What would you do instead?’

‘I don’t know. I have a lot of options. Civilian medicine; research—the Daystrom, the VSA, the new Bajoran outfit, that sort of thing; relief work. In roughly ascending order of preference. Anyway, as far as I’m taking this for now is that I’ve sent a few letters this morning, and I have a few more to write, to start to feel out what might be available in the next year or so. In the long term, well, a lot of things could happen. But I won’t make any immediate decision. I will command the _Peseshet’s_ next deployment—not,’ she smirked, ‘that I think I’m irreplaceable, but I have a responsibility to her crew that I won’t set aside. That will be six months. Which is more than enough time to think this over and plan the next step.’ 

Laris couldn’t shake the feeling that this all seemed terribly convenient. ‘You hadn’t thought about any of this before this morning?’ 

‘ _Thought_ about it, certainly. But I had no plans to make a change any time soon, no. And, to be clear, I still don’t, not until I find another position that is right for me.’ 

‘But you _would_ do this? Just for me?’ Laris scoffed. 

‘I—no. Not _for_ you, no. But… in order to have a life that includes you? Yes. It may be that with time we will see that the solution lies elsewhere, but at the moment it seems to me impossible to ask you to trust me, to feel safe with me, as long as I wear that uniform.’ Beverly lay her hands flat on Picard’s desk, closed her eyes and took a deep unsteady breath. When she met Laris’s eye again, her air of professional practicality had nearly vanished. ‘We’ve only just begun to discover this—this precious thing, and I am not willing to relinquish it while there are other viable options. You asked me once if I had room for you. I swore to you I did. This, to me, is what that means.’

‘That simple,’ Laris said, with more incredulity than she intended. 

‘Laris.’ Beverly’s voice cracked, and the last veneer of control fell from her expression. ‘I _cannot tolerate_ the idea of becoming an object of fear to you. Of harm.’ Her voice caught; her eyes shone. 

_You aren’t_ , Laris wanted desperately to say. Wanted to stand up and go to her and hold her and say _you could never be_. ‘I know,’ she said instead. 

‘Okay,’ Beverly said, quite visibly struggling to maintain her composure. But she took another deep breath, and soldiered on. ‘But as I said, I think I should go. At least for a few days.’ The feeling returned: relief, and the chasm opening.

‘Where would you go?’ She sounded dispassionate enough, she thought. Too dispassionate? Who could say.

‘Paris, first. I’ve booked a room for tonight.’ 

‘You have had a busy morning.’ Laris winced at her own tone. ‘Sorry. Disregard.’ Beverly didn’t comment. Laris cleared her throat. ‘Paris first?’

‘Then, we’ll see. I owe Kate and Nella a visit, but that depends on what their time is like. I had a message the other day from Keiko O’Brien inviting me to Dublin… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just stay in Paris and walk until my head clears.’ 

‘When would you return?’

‘Well. I think the first question is, do you want me to return?’ There was something so disarming in the way she fought so hard to say it plainly. Something so brave. Even wrecked and sleepless and on the verge of tears she was so stupidly fucking beautiful.

‘Yes.’ Laris didn’t think before she said it; it was pure impulse, but it was the truest, clearest feeling she had had in the past eighteen hours. ‘I do. I’m sure,’ she added, before Beverly could ask again.

‘Three nights, to start?’

‘No, a definite commitment.’ It seemed so urgent, suddenly. ‘However long you like, just make it definite, and be here when you say you will.’

‘Three nights, then.’

‘So, Friday.’

‘Friday.’

‘What time?’ For some reason, _that_ was the thing that made Beverly at last incapable of restraining a sudden gulping sob, a rush of tears. 

‘Three o’clock?’ she said in a silly, hopeful voice, skin splotchy, eyes shining, but smiling through it. And Laris felt her lungs fully inflate as though they had been pressed in a vise and suddenly released.

‘Three o’clock, then.’ 

They sat looking at each other for a moment, as though caught together in this fragment of time where they had almost, but not quite, found the way back. Laris wished she knew what to say. All she managed was to lay her hand over her heart in imitation of Beverly’s, with an attempt at what she hoped was a determined sort of look.

‘I’ll get my things,’ said Beverly, as though released from a spell.

‘I’ll tell Zhaban to get the flier ready.’

‘I think I’d rather walk into town, get the tram from there. Then the—the maglev from Carcassonne. It’ll still get me there by one or so.’ Watching her grasp at logistics like a lifeline might have made Laris laugh, some other time.

‘Okay.’

‘Okay.’

* * *

She loitered by the door til Beverly came down, which was worth the searing anxiety just to see the thing that washed over Beverly’s whole face when she saw her standing there. 

‘Just wanted to see you off,’ she said, rocking on the balls of her feet.

‘Thank you,’ Beverly replied, a little hoarse. They stood looking at each other stupidly for an awkward moment. 

Then Laris said, ‘Hell with it,’ dropped her guard, and wrapped her arms around Beverly’s waist, buried her nose in Beverly’s shoulder. She felt Beverly exhale as though she’d been holding her breath all morning, and let herself sink, just for a moment, into what it felt like to be held by her. ‘This isn’t over,’ she whispered. Beverly squeezed her quite tightly. 

When at last they separated, Laris pressed a quick kiss to Beverly’s lips and said, ‘I’ll see you Friday.’

‘See you Friday,’ Beverly said, looking slightly dazed. 

Laris held the door for her. ‘Be good,’ she said, and felt it in her heart when Beverly laughed aloud.


	9. Chapter 9

The dim grey of the not-yet-morning found Laris on her knees in the dirt, digging out Zhaban’s tomatoes, which he’d been meaning to get round to dealing with for weeks. She’d slept most of the rest of the day after Beverly had left, and a fair bit of the following day, too. But this morning four o’clock had found her wakeful, so she had left Zhaban snoring, walked the dog to the river and back, and paced the kitchen til she couldn’t stand it. Now here she was, working off her nerves with a rusty trowel and her bare hands. As she fetched Francine’s flame gun from the shed and dragged the plants out onto the asphalt, she heard Prema Rhyl’s voice in the back of her mind suggesting that her impulse to perform acts of contrition in response to receiving care might be a thing worth examining more closely. But what did Prema Rhyl know about the satisfaction of finding one’s love language in setting fire to innocent nightshades in the middle of the road at dawn. 

Prema had made time for a vid call the previous afternoon, and had asked lowball questions until Laris was able to begin to find some words. But mostly she’d provided reassurance in the form of a reminder that this, now, while bad, was nothing like it had been, once. And reassurance, too, that it was real. That something had, in fact, happened; was still happening. They’d set up a weekly appointment, with the goal that Laris would go to Toulouse to see her in person a month hence. That seemed to Laris an outrageous ambition, but Prema was perfectly confident. She’d offered to prescribe her something, in case of more attacks, but hadn’t pressed the issue. Presumably because she knew that if Laris wanted sedatives, she’d have no trouble accessing better product more efficiently, and be all the happier for its being completely off the record. That was what Laris liked best about Prema—due respect for both her autonomy and her skill set. 

She poured a bucket of water over the ashes of the tomatoes, and tried to think of other things she could set fire to. She had to settle for sharpening Zhaban’s knives and deep-cleaning the kitchen til every surface sparkled. She remade all the beds, so that she could return to hers and leave him to his space. Clean sheets were better, but it was good to notice, too, that the smell of sex and Beverly on the old ones didn’t frighten her. She rewired the wonky sconce in the dining room so that it gave a soft, even light instead of a creepy horror-holo guttering glow. And she made her daily round of the house, checking cameras and power cells, dusting as she went. But the point came when she could make no more atonement work for herself.

Well, there was one thing more.

She climbed up to her studio, where she kept her low-security data. Her books, her holo-drama library, her music. And whatever she wanted to keep from her weekly offload of her padd—personal correspondence, mainly. Texts and vid messages, the odd archived subspace thread. Deanna’s bunnicorn memes.

And Beverly’s letter.

‘Computer, window setting three,’ she said, and the shades faded, and light poured in, and the sighing sound of every casement opening by ten degrees at once made her own breath come easier. She toed off her shoes and stood in the center of the room, in the bright noonday light that splashed across the floor, and closed her eyes, and focused on her breathing. The first thing she had done after Picard had given her permission to build a space for herself up here had been to install a sprung oak floor over the ancient brick, and the feel of it under her bare feet unfailingly grounded her, brought her down into her body. When she opened her eyes again, things were a little more in focus, and she knew a little better where she was. The gap between her and herself had narrowed almost to closing. 

She located last year’s datarod, loaded it to her desktop, and folding herself into her chair, took one more deep, long breath, and read as carefully and slowly as she could.

> _MS Peseshet, NCC-54813_  
>  _Stardate 76840.29_  
>  _3 November, 2399_  
> 
> 
> _Laris —_
> 
> _I have been trying to write this for days. I hope you don’t think I haven’t been thinking of you. I’ve failed a number of times so far to say anything in any way that seems adequate to the purpose, and there’s no end in sight. So now I think I’ll just fail again, but let you see it this time._
> 
> _Above all I regret intensely the way I spoke to you last week. I regret intensely having left you with anger between us. I am writing in the hope that what’s gone wrong can be repaired; in the hope that you can forgive the things I said and, too, that you can perhaps come to see my commitment to my work with less anger._
> 
> _What I can’t apologize for is the fact of having left the vineyard—left you—so abruptly. It’s true in an objective sense that I could have chosen otherwise, but—even straining for candor—I have difficulty seeing it any other way than that I had no choice. I do accept that that is about me. But it’s an intractable thing about me. It’s part of who I am, and I can’t change it. If I could, I wouldn’t want to._
> 
> _In the time it has taken me to be able to begin to write this letter, it has occurred to me that the way you know me, the way you have always known me, has been in a context almost entirely cut off from my work life, which is nearly all of my life. You have had a very narrow view of me, without either of us realizing it. My being called to—okay, my volunteering for active duty must have seemed intrusive to you in a way it could not to me, no matter how inconvenient, no matter how much I hated to leave you. I don't know what I could say in total honesty that would ease that friction. My work is not a dissonant feature of my life; it is fundamental. If it is dissonant for you, that is a difficulty that we will have to, somehow, confront. I don't have the faintest idea how to do that. Do you? I mean it; I want to find the way through this._
> 
> _What I am sorry for, what I was sorry for immediately and wish I could have apologized to you for, wish I had tried harder to apologize to you for in person, right away, is letting my defensiveness get the best of me. I hate how I lashed out at you; I hate that I spoke to wound, I hate that I belittled your experience, that I twisted things I love and admire about you into things to hurt you with. Part of why this is so hard to write is that I can’t find any way of accounting for any of that except to say how deeply sorry I am for it. It may be that I was caught off guard by how abruptly we ran into such an immovable difference of understanding. Those weeks with you… I wish it wasn’t so hard to think about, now; I don’t know when I’ve been so happy. Felt so close to someone so intuitively. Not recently. Not in a long time. And that’s it, maybe, maybe it’s that having found that intimacy with you so natural, so easy, it was a shock to come so suddenly up against an immovable obstacle, such an unbridgeable difference of understanding, with no time to find our way past it together._
> 
> _All that doesn’t come near to excusing any of it; I’m still left with nothing to say for myself but that I am so, so very sorry. I hope I’ll never speak to you that way again._
> 
> _And I never want to leave you with that fear again. But this circles round again to the problem of my work. I don’t know the solution. I want to find it._
> 
> _I wish this letter was better. I wish I could make it do what I want it to do. I don’t know how. I want badly to know what you are thinking, what you’re feeling, want to know what you need from me to move forward. Want desperately to move forward. The fear that I may have lost you over this is overwhelming. If you’re angry, if you’re hurt, afraid, I can only hope that you will share it with me when and as you can._
> 
> _I don’t know how to end this._
> 
> _Laris, I miss you._
> 
> _I miss you, I miss you. I miss you._
> 
> _Please reply, by voice or vid or text, whatever, just please let me hear from you._
> 
> _B_

Laris sat back abruptly and dismissed the interface; then called it up again and stared at it. Could this really be the letter she’d refused to answer, four months gone? Absurdly, she ran it through an authentication algorithm. As though someone might be interfering with her private romantic drama. As though she’d find an excuse for herself if she just processed the file enough times. She read it again, and a third time. 

If she had copped herself the _fuck_ on and read it properly at the time, if she had replied like a normal adult woman, would any of the rest of this have happened? Possibly. Probably. Possibly. 

And what would she have said? Would it have mattered? All Beverly had asked, the _only_ thing she had asked for, was to hear from her. ‘Fuck,’ she said aloud, rubbing her eyes and staring at the interface again. ‘Fuck.’

Suddenly decisive—or impulsive—she fished her padd out of her belt and typed quickly: _Can’t wait to see you tomorrow xL_. She hit send before she could think about it, and threw the thing at the desk like it was a venomous insect. 

‘Fuck!’ she shouted. Then she stood, unhitched her belt and dropped it on the table. ‘Computer, resume playback.’ A Rihan voice, set to a metronome, bade her hold for three counts. She’d start wherever she’d left off, it didn’t matter. She hadn’t stretched in days, she’d need to play it through at least twice anyhow. What she needed was the voice, the rhythm. To be told what to do. She rocked on the balls of her feet, taking deep, steadying breaths. She skinned off her jumper and threw that on the table, too. She waited for the voice to come to the next sequence, and when it did, she stepped into the sunlight that spread across her floor, dropped into the posture that her muscles knew like they knew breathing, and then the next one, and the next, and soon she thought of nothing else.

* * *

When she came down, showered and dressed and a little less bowled over, she found Zhaban at the base of the stairs, and in a good mood, because he’d discovered a minor emergency he could involve himself in. 

‘I was just coming to look for you,’ he said, shrugging on a jacket. ‘Sami called, that mare of hers just went into labor.’ His eyes gleamed. 

‘The one with the ridiculous name? Clafoutis?’

‘Croquembouche.’

‘Poor animal. But how does this involve you, exactly?’ 

‘Some kind of complication, she’s got all hands on. Béa won’t be back from the fair til late, so she wants someone looking after Amal til Leila gets home from… dance? Piano? Whichever it is this month.’

Laris smiled at his fond tone. ‘Go on, then, Tonton Zhaban,’ she said. 

‘You be all right here for a few hours?’

‘Don’t be silly, of course I will.’ 

‘There’s a four o’clock tour—’

She looked at her padd: quarter to four. ‘I’ll handle it,’ she said without thinking.

He looked surprised. ‘Are you sure?’

Of course she wasn’t. ‘Would you rather I take the kid?’ The last time she’d had charge of Leila and Amal had been the incident two years ago when she’d shown them—aged twelve and six, respectively—how to build a simple keylogger on their home comm. Her conviction that there was nothing wrong with teaching children valuable life skills, and that their parents should be proud of the aptitude they’d demonstrated, had not prevailed with the said parents. She’d apologized for form’s sake, but she had not been asked to babysit again.

‘I was going to say, cancel the tour,’ Zhaban said diplomatically. 

‘It’s grand, I’ll take care of it—go on, go play.’ He lingered, looking at her with almost comically tender concern, and she laughed. ‘Most beloved. My true heart.’ She laid a loving hand on his chest. ‘ _Eejit_. I’m fine. Go.’

‘If anything—’

‘ _Go!_ ’ she ordered, pointing to the door, and laughing, watched him bow his way out. She leaned against the doorjamb, watching him cross the field, that goofy lopsided loping gait she knew as well as she knew her own. She wondered, sometimes, whether he would have been happier with children of his own, in another life. With another partner. He’d never said so, not even when she’d asked straight out, but then, he wouldn’t. And when she saw how he was with Sami and Béa’s girls, she did wonder. She heaved an enormous sigh and scrubbed a hand across her mouth. She owed him a very great deal indeed.

She’d start with this gaggle of tourists. She glanced in the mirror by the door. It wasn’t quite as bad as she expected. ‘Fuck it,’ she muttered, pulled on her boots, grabbed a jacket, and instinctively fluffed her hair out over her ears. But as she approached the waiting group, she tucked it back again.

She stuck mainly to the script, surprised at how easily it came to her now, and more surprised at how it buoyed her mood, surprised to hear the animation in her own voice. And when a striking woman asked in a thick Occitan accent about the impact of hotter growing seasons on the wine, she took a deep breath, and answered honestly.

* * *

Zhaban whistled to himself as he stowed the eggs and butter Sami had sent him home with, setting out some preserves and pickles to remember to bring her in return tomorrow. He spent a moment just standing there enjoying the silence, the space, grateful as ever to be _Tonton_ and not _Papa_. Amal and Leila might be the most chilled-out children in the galaxy, and he couldn’t think of anything he wouldn’t do for them, but this—home, quiet, time, freedom—was incalculable bliss. 

He found Laris lying on the couch, reading from a padd, the dog curled up at her feet. If—when—Picard came back, he was going to have things to say about her total disregard for rules relating to animals and upholstery. She didn’t look up when he came in, just stretched one arm back towards him. He took her hand and stroked her forearm, and waited for her full attention. After a moment she set the padd on the table and smiled up at him.

‘Hello there,’ she said. She looked and sounded so much herself that it felt, to him, like coming up for air after a deep, long dive.

‘Hey,’ he said, stupidly fond. 

‘You eaten?’

‘Yeah, Sami had a few of those pie things lying around. Emphasis on past tense. You?’

‘Yep.’

‘Laris.’

‘Honest!’ To his raised brow, she protested, ‘See for yourself if there’s any of that confit left, then.’ The image of her standing at the counter summarily dispensing with the better part of a whole duck made him smile. 

‘Good. Drink?’

‘Yes.’

He opened up that piquepoul. There were only a few bottles remaining, but what did he think he was saving them for?

When he handed her a glass, and watched her eyes widen and her smile go feral as she smelled it, he thought: ah, that’s what for. Number One dutifully slithered down from his perch on command, albeit with a heavy grudging look in his eyes, and Zhaban moved to take his place at Laris’s feet. But she made a dissenting sound and gestured him closer, patting her chest, so he lay back against her, propping his calves on the arm of the couch. She kissed his head and laid an arm across his chest, and he stroked her knee, and they sipped their wine, and he thought he’d be content to die there.

‘How was babysitting?’ she asked, a little teasingly. 

‘Oh, easy. Amal does nothing but read these days. Leila got home over an hour ago, but she coerced me into setting her chess problems.’ Before long, he’d be out of the ones he knew from memory. The girl had always been clever, but at fourteen, she was getting prodigious.

‘You’re hopeless.’

‘I am, indeed, a sucker. But what she really wanted was to interrogate me about you.’ 

‘Me?’

‘She thinks you’re the coolest, Laris, what can I say? Kids get such weird ideas.’ She punched his arm; he jostled her knee. ‘Anyway, seriously, you should spend some time with her. Sami and Béa do their best, but they’re such jocks. And she’s getting to that age where she’s starting to realize how small her world is, you know?’ Laris wasn’t, as a rule, huge on kids, but slightly-maladjusted-girl-child-too-smart-for-her-immediate-surroundings was very much her territory.

‘I’ll talk to Béa,’ she said in a tone of mild dread.

‘Hey, she adores you too, you know. And Sami’s just intimidated by you. I think they’re over the whole security-breach-as-enrichment-activity thing.’ Laris laughed, which was a good sign. ‘What about you?’ 

‘Oh, fine. Small group, nothing too ridiculous. There was an interesting woman from Gaillac—you know the co-op there? She grows their pinots gris, turns out. Anyway, she asked at the end about the weather, and I said what I thought—’

He laughed.

‘What?’

‘Oh, just thinking it’s a good thing your French is more… specialized than your English.’

‘I was very cool and measured,’ she said in a tone that suggested just the opposite. ‘ _Anyhow_ , she told me they’ve been working on organizing some vintners to try to get a hearing at Climate, and we talked about that for a while. She was very compelling, very smart.’ He wondered about the animation in her voice. The woman? Or the cause? Knowing Laris, both. ‘I asked her if she’d gotten in touch with any other farmers, and she hadn’t, so I gave her contacts for some of our people.’ 

_Our people_. ‘Sounds interesting,’ he said mildly, not wanting to betray too much investment.

‘Mm. Anyway, she invited us to a meeting. In Toulouse, in a couple weeks.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told her I’d go.’ The way she lifted her hand from his chest and let it fall again suggested she was having some regrets about that. He’d have to be careful not to push it, if he wanted her to have a chance of talking herself into going.

‘Why do I get the feeling,’ he asked, with a foreboding not entirely feigned, ‘that this ends with you hacking the planet?’ 

‘Someone’s got to do it,’ she said in a martyred tone.

‘A hero for our time.’

‘That’s right.’ She clinked her glass against his.

‘What were you reading, when I came in?’

‘Just some poems.’ She switched to Rihannsu, and he felt some low-level tension he hadn't even been aware of ebb out of him. Sometimes, after long days or weeks of French and English, it felt almost like a secret code between them; sometimes, it felt like they two alone in the world had in common this whispering language of sibilants and subjunctives. Sometimes that thought came to him with an intolerable weight of grief; sometimes, like now, it seemed a private treasure. ‘Someone called Rifka Laetor?’ 

‘Do I know them?’

‘Her. Don’t think so. I didn’t.’ Then definitely not. ‘Twenty-first century. Just the one book. Someone uploaded a transcription to the litrecover channel; they were comparing her to Premak, which is why I got interested, but that’s nonsense. They shared an idiom! Of course they did! They lived in the same place at the same time! But can anyone see past that to the fact that they have nothing whatsoever in common at the level of form, figure, syntax even? So illiterate.’ He smiled to himself, sipping his wine and stroking her knee. Hard to believe he’d once found her arrogance unbearable. Laris when someone was wrong on subspace was one of the most beautiful things he knew. ‘She’s very interesting though,’ she went on. ‘Doesn’t fit the usual frameworks for the period at all. And she can really turn a line.’ Laris when she'd found a woman poet she admired might be more beautiful still. ‘Want to hear?’

Did he ever. ‘Sure,’ he said.

She set her glass down and picked up the padd again, clicking her tongue absently as she paged back, searching, then kissed his head and cleared her throat, and began to read.

Her reading voice was low and melodic, and she read with such fluidity, the archaic forms of their language easy on her lips, natural in her southern inflections. Her hand swept slowly back and forth across his chest to the rhythm of the lines. The poems were dense, recursive lyrics on time and devotion, highly formal, and full of metaphors from antiquated physics that he only half understood. Slowly, they began to sound the same, repeating rhythms and motifs, even sounds recurring, vowels and consonants in iterating patterns, clear and soft in Laris’s voice. 

The first time he’d caught her reading poetry he’d been gobsmacked, this sharp cold girl he’d been forced to share a room and a life with hiding illicit books under her mattress. And still more surprised at the nature of the poetry: heavily erotic lyrics that were technically illegal, not for their eroticism but for their treasonous endorsement of adultery and other forms of disloyalty. He’d been ruthless with her over them, teased her mercilessly and held the threat of informing on her over her head for far too long—it was how he’d started calling her _passionflower_ , a frequent epithet in those poems, a taunt to ridicule her reading and, in the presence of others, a thinly veiled threat. Exactly when and how it had transformed between them, how it had evolved into something tender and precious, he had never been able to pinpoint. In any case, she’d gotten her own back, and then some.

‘What?’ Laris said, interrupting her reading. He realized he was smiling. 

‘I was just remembering Pol Atlek,’ he said, and laughed as she scoffed and swatted his forehead. 

‘You were such a feckin’ arse,’ she said in her vivid English. 

‘You were magnificent.’

‘I was.’ 

‘Still are, sahe’legge,’ he agreed, with heavy irony, and she scoffed again.

‘And you, _e’lev_ , are still an arse,’ she said, reminding him that his own epithet had not exactly come at first from a place of kindness either—though by the time she’d adopted the English word _beloved_ as its translation, it had long since become something else altogether.

‘Your one, though,’ he countered. ‘By your own choice.’

‘That you are,’ she said, and stroked his cheek. ‘More poems?’

‘Please.’ 

She read, and her hand moved up and down across his chest, and he lay back against her, and he drank the wine they had made out of the earth with their own hands, and there in the warmth of her body and her voice, for a while there was nothing more he could imagine ever wanting.


	10. Chapter 10

Friday dawned bright and cold, blustery and clear; the kind of day when you could see, from the right vantage, the jagged blue line of the Pyrénées on the horizon, and every nearer ridgeline crisp against the sky. It was an uphill battle, but Laris did her best to not be a complete and utter lunatic. Zhaban, because he understood and loved her, offered her the task of burning the annual heap of vine clippings, and when that was done, presented her with a puzzle in the form of a fertilizer drone that appeared to have gone on strike. Driven mad by the messy, badly documented, very Federation code, if you could call it that, of the manufacturer’s software, she’d long since just rewritten it herself. But, it turned out, sometimes problems arose from trying to do complicated things with no specialist knowledge whatsoever. As Zhaban knew well, and somewhat incomprehensibly tolerated, she wouldn’t learn the lesson so long as it kept paying dividends in the form of more and more bizarre errors to solve.

So now she sat on her studio floor with her work computer, stretching and making baffled noises at her own past programming decisions, and at the back of her mind she ran over and over what she might say to Beverly; what she felt she had to apologize for, what she felt she had a right to ask. What she wanted, which she was almost sure she knew. Something was missing, there was a piece she couldn’t place, one thing more that needed dredging up before they could move on. She could feel the contours of it, but she couldn’t find it. She did, however, fix the drone. For now.

When she could sit still no longer, she took the dog for a long walk, and came around the corner of the house at just about exactly three p.m. And there, halfway down the drive, was Beverly, being greeted by Zhaban. Heart in her throat, she watched him clasp her into a tight hug that lasted much longer than she expected; he seemed to say something into her hair. When she pulled back, she wiped her cheek, and he held her still and kissed her brow, and kept one arm around her as they approached the house together. But as they drew closer, Laris could see that they were laughing.

Number One was positively vibrating next to her, looking up at her anxiously. ‘Vas-y alors,’ she said, signing her permission, and couldn’t help but laugh, watching him cannonball straight for Beverly. His joyful woof of welcome made Beverly and Zhaban look her way, and she waved, and steeled herself, and walked to meet them. 

She preempted a hug with three quick awkward bises, a hand on Beverly’s arm by way of compensation. Beverly flushed, and Zhaban looked at both of them with an exasperation he was no longer able, or perhaps no longer willing, to disguise. He took Beverly’s bag, and bent to kiss Laris’s temple before he went in. ‘Remember what you know, sahe’legge,’ he whispered against her ear. She squeezed his hand and watched him go, bargaining with the dog to come along. What luck she had. 

Turning back to Beverly, lovely in the stark light—her wind-tossed hair, the familiar way she wrung her hands when she was anxious, her tentative half-smile—she felt that wild telescoping of reality into unreality and back again and wondered how the hell she was going to land the right way up.

‘Hi,’ Beverly said.

Laris laughed, but she kept her hands in her pockets, rocking on the balls of her feet. ‘Hiya,’ she said, and after a moment, turned, nodding for Beverly to follow her, and walked out toward the great old chestnut tree that stood among the vines, just coming into leaf. ‘How was your trip?’ she asked, as though it were normal.

‘Oh. Good. Paris is lovely this time of year.’

Laris snorted. ‘Slate grey and perpetually damp?’

‘Well, yeah.’ 

‘Did you see Kate and Nella?’

‘Yes, I stayed with them in London last night.’

‘And how was that?’ 

‘Good. And… instructive.’ 

Laris waited to see if Beverly would clarify, but she said no more. ‘And… why is this like pulling teeth?’

Beverly stopped and stared at her a moment, and then bowed her head and laughed. ‘Fair enough. Sorry. Jesus, I’m—I’m so _nervous_ ,’ she blurted, with a disarming self-conscious smile.

‘Would you like some time to—’ Laris gestured toward the house.

Beverly shook her head. ‘No, I—I don’t want to stop looking at you,’ she said, and then laughed again and blushed and winced all at once. ‘Oh, what is wrong with me? I feel completely insane. I just—can I—’ She took a step toward Laris, reaching out a tentative hand. Laris took it, held it for a moment, and then stepped into her arms. ‘Yes,’ Beverly sighed into her hair, holding her close. 

She nestled her nose under Beverly’s jaw and said, ‘I feel pretty feckin’ mad as well, Bev.’ And Beverly laughed, held her and laughed, and Laris pressed herself close against her, closed her eyes and focused on her strange slow drumbeat of a human pulse, on the rise and fall of her narrow human ribs, and the sweet-sharp scent of her perfume, jasmine and bitter orange and dark wood. And how her hands flexed, gripping her tightly, her gasp and sigh and clutch at the moment when she realized that Laris had no intention of letting go. ‘It’s you,’ Laris whispered against her neck, breathing her in deeply.

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s you,’ she said again, and pulled back a little, rested her hands on Beverly’s shoulders. ‘I… the other day. I… lost track of things, a bit. Of you. I’m sorry.’ She paused, looking up at her. ‘It’s good to see you, Beverly,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’s good to see _you_ , you-you, real you. Ah, feck, I sound—’

‘No, I understand. I think I understand.’ She paused a long moment— _I don’t want to stop looking at you._ ‘How are you doing?’ That searching gaze. Laris laughed. ‘What?’

‘You’re such a bloody physician, is what. I’m all right. Really; I’ll tell you more about it later. But how are _you_?’ She’d done so much heavy lifting, and Laris had nothing to offer in return. It was hard to see what could be done to balance the scale.

‘I’m fine, I—I’m relieved. I was so—’ She broke off and shook her head. ‘It’s good to see you, too. It’s so good to see you,’ she said, looking so intently at her with that shining tender smile of hers. ‘Laris,’ she said, like she was testing the word to see if it would hold. ‘Can—shit,’ she laughed nervously, took a breath, and tried again: ‘Can I kiss you?’ 

Laris wanted to find some arch reply to cut through all that earnestness, all that intensity, but instead she felt a stupid, helpless grin break across her face and sting her eyes and all she could do was nod, nod fervently and take Beverly’s face between her hands and lift herself up on tiptoe and press her mouth ardently to hers.

Beverly whimpered and gripped her tightly, winding her hand in her hair and biting her lip, and Laris gasped against the desperate, helpless feeling that overwhelmed her, made her clutch Beverly tightly around the waist and grasp at her hair and bruise her mouth against her teeth. It _was_ mad, she thought, how much of this was physical, how much her body yearned for this woman’s body, how satisfied her whole self was by the simple fact of her proximity, by contact and awareness, the shapes of her and how she moved, it was absolutely mad how easy it would be to convince herself that nothing mattered but this deep embodied need of hers for contact with this woman. How dangerous it was, how safe she felt in this woman’s arms.

She pushed back, gasping, one hand flat on Beverly’s sternum, as if to hold her off. She wasn’t going to make this mistake again. She also had no idea where or how to start not-making it. She looked up at Beverly, studying her expression.

‘Want to see a baby horse?’ she blurted. 

Beverly gave a bewildered laugh. ‘What?’

‘Sami’s mare foaled yesterday, Zhaban was there but I haven’t seen it yet.’ She probably sounded fairly manic. She didn’t care.

‘I—all right?’ Beverly said bemusedly, and let Laris take her by the hand and lead her across the field. 

They walked up to the split-rail fence that ran between the vineyard and the pasture, where Sami’s horses happily grazed, the newest member of the little herd looking ridiculous on her outsized legs, but astonishingly complete for someone who had only been in the world a single day.

Laris found them mesmerizing. Earth animals still had, after all these years, a kind of uncanny cast to them. They looked almost artificial, over-smooth, like animated renderings of animals that fell just short of realism. It had taken her a long time to get over the sense that she was stuck in one long holo-simulation, and even now, these horses, the color of the grass, the oversaturated sky, gave her that feeling of surreality she wasn’t sure she’d ever fully shake.

‘Aren’t they magnificent,’ Beverly breathed.

‘They are,’ said Laris, and meant it. 

They stood leaning on the fence together, sharing silence, watching the animals. The strange thought occurred to Laris that they might after all be more familiar to her than to Beverly, who grew up in a wasteland and spent her life in space. That in some ways Laris was much more of this planet than Beverly would ever be. The idea made her dizzy.

‘I reread your letter,’ she said. As long as she was going to be dizzy. 

‘Did you?’

‘Mm. I’m sorry I didn’t read it more carefully at the time. I’m sorry for leaving you all those weeks with no reply. I really am, Beverly.’ She glanced up at her, and Beverly nodded and exhaled as though relieved of something heavy. ‘Not least,’ she went on, ‘because I think what you said is very right. About how the version of you that I see here is only a partial view.’ She turned to face her fully. The flush the wind had blown into her cheeks. Her eyes as oversaturated as the sky. ‘I want to see the rest, too. That’s work for both of us, I should think.’ 

‘Yeah,’ Beverly said, looking at her with something approaching wonder. ‘Thank you.’

‘No. I’m sorry it took me so long to see. I’ve been very—I’ve been very selfish with you, Beverly. I haven’t _let_ you let me see you.’

‘Too afraid of what you’d see?’

‘Possibly,’ Laris admitted. ‘But I’m working on that.’ 

‘What would help?’

Laris smiled at her. ‘Start by telling me some stories.’ 

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know, tell me about that eejit,’ she said, gesturing back at the house. ‘Or tell me about the _Enterprise_.’ 

‘Well,’ Beverly smiled, sly and smug as a cat. ‘There was the time I flew the ship into a sun.’

‘Sure, no wonder you’re not allowed a pilot’s license.’ 

‘Hey!’ Beverly hipchecked her. 

‘What, you set yourself up for that.’ 

‘I did,’ Beverly acknowledged. She smiled and tossed her hair back. ‘All right. Deal. Story time, whenever you like. What else?’

‘You tell me.’ The story about Jack had her thinking she needed to do a lot more listening. ‘Not this instant, like, but you tell me.’

‘All right,’ Beverly said softly. ‘I will. Thank you.’ 

Laris nodded. ‘There’s an obverse to that too, you know,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘This place…’ She shifted to lean back against the fence, gazing back toward the house. ‘This place is a holiday for you. An escape, a fantasy,’ she said. ‘But for me, it’s everything. It’s life.’ An abrogated little world, narrow, but, she was beginning to hope, entire. 

Beverly looked stunned. ‘Jesus, Laris.’ She raked a hand through her hair, and laughed a little bewilderedly. ‘Yeah.’ 

‘What?’ 

‘You just…’ The way Beverly looked at her, that lip-biting smile, those bright wondering eyes. ‘You just have this way of cutting right through things, sometimes.’ 

Beverly looked like she wanted to kiss her again, but she couldn’t quite stand it. Not yet. She looked down at the ground, and then away. She understood, suddenly, the missing piece, the thing she’d felt, unseen, all morning. 

‘There’s also…’ This was so much harder; for this she had no words, no safe approach. ‘There’s also the fact of _my_ work.’

‘Your work?’ Beverly asked, puzzled.

‘I don’t mean here, I don’t mean on the vineyard. I mean,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘if I know only a little about what you do for Starfleet…’ She watched the realization dawn: Beverly knew absolutely nothing about what she had done for the Tal Shiar. 

‘Well, but I’ve always known what I don’t know,’ Beverly said easily, like it was straightforward.

‘Are you sure about that?’ She wasn’t always sure _she_ knew. She blinked against the rush of images that tried to form in her mind. Everything that Beverly didn’t know, that she never wanted Beverly to know. Nor Picard, nor anyone. She’d erase it even from Zhaban’s memory if she could, and her own. She held it back. She’d had a lot of practice.

‘… No. That’s fair. No, I’m not.’ Beverly met her eye. ‘But I’m sure of you.’ 

What a mad proposition. ‘How? Why?’

‘I hate to break it to you, Laris,’ she said with a teasing smile, ‘but you’re an honest woman.’

Laris scoffed. She couldn’t tolerate the idea of Beverly knowing all that, seeing all that she’d once been; she found it equally intolerable to withhold something so essential from someone she wanted to be so close to, someone from whom she was asking so much. Presumably a human wouldn’t see that the way she did, but didn’t that only make it worse? Like she was exploiting a loophole; making a cheap escape. ‘You really have no idea,’ she said, and it stuck painfully in her throat.

‘I do.’ Beverly shifted slightly, just a little closer. Just enough that Laris could feel her warmth, smell her perfume. ‘I know who you have been to Jean-Luc these fifteen years, which in itself would be enough for me, no matter what came before. But I know who you are to me, too. And I want to find out who you will be. Your past is yours; you’ll share it with me if you want to, and if you don’t, well, what matters to me is the person in front of me.’

‘And who is she?’ 

‘She’s careful. Forthright. Loyal.’ Beverly shifted closer again. ‘Committed. Present. When we first knew each other, god, I was _so_ suspicious of you, I thought he was insane to trust you, I was constantly looking for any sign of anything deceitful or dishonest in you, and I never found it. Now I feel sure I never will.’ What a thing to say. 

‘What a thing to say,’ she said, looking up at her, half incapable of understanding, and Beverly palmed her cheek and kissed her, very tenderly. She turned to kiss the heel of her hand, then took it in both of hers, studying the fine mechanics of her knuckles. How humans managed not to just be constantly breaking themselves, she could never fathom. But Beverly’s hand in hers seemed the farthest thing from fragile. ‘Don’t leave Starfleet for me,’ she said, suddenly certain, meeting her eye. ‘Not just for me. Or to make room for me, or whatever. Do it because it’s the right thing to do, right for you or just right, if you think it is. Or don’t, if it isn’t. For me, it’s enough that you’re taking it seriously.’ She thought it was. She thought it should be. 

‘It does seem right to me,’ Beverly said. ‘We’ll see. I’m not there quite yet. But it does seem right.’

‘Why? I mean, why now?’

Beverly sighed and drew back, turning to look out over the pasture, leaning on the railing, clasping her hands together. She rocked back and forth, squinting the way she did when she was working something out. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I think you made me confront something that I haven’t been willing to confront. I’ve worked a long time a long way from the center of things. Out there, in deep space, on the frontline, at whatever _frontier_ , it’s very easy to pretend not to be responsible for the things that happen at home. Especially if that home has never actually been your home, and it has never been mine. It’s easy not to feel the shifts of politics and policy, or to pretend that’s not what they are.’

Laris had that telescoping feeling again. Something about Picard finally made sense to her. ‘For him, too,’ she said. 

‘For him, too,’ Beverly repeated thoughtfully, as though she too was seeing something new. ‘But he’s different, he’s— _he’s_ ideological. But he has never, as long as I’ve known him, been able to see how what he thinks is right and what Starfleet does are not necessarily gonna turn out to be the same thing. Even after…’ She gestured to the thing not to be named. But then she smiled. ‘Anyway, we can cover that in story time.’ 

Laris laughed. ‘Yeah, okay. And you?’

‘Me, hah. Maybe I really am just naïve,’ she said, bitterly, like she meant it.

‘I don’t really think that, you know,’ Laris countered. Which was true. Most of the time. 

‘I know,’ Beverly said. She rocked and leaned against the fence, thinking. Laris watched her hands, flexing, half-gesturing, indexing her thought. It was so good to just stand there and watch her think. Stand there and watch her think and know that the way forward was before them. She leaned, just a little, into her warmth. Beverly smiled, and then finally spoke. ‘This is going to seem so small, in comparison to—. Well. But something I keep thinking about is this: always, as long as I have been in Starfleet, the expectation has been that in any conflict scenario, field triage and first aid were to be offered to everyone, anyone, regardless of allegiance. What that means in practice varies widely, for a lot of reasons good and bad, but it has _always_ been a basic tenet of protocol.’ She took a deep breath. ‘This summer, during the Breen border incursions, for the first time ever, I was instructed, explicitly, by Command to “deprioritize enemy wounded.” Made no difference in that instance, of course, the Breen being the Breen, they’d never let a Starfleet medic near them, but.’ She raised her eyebrows, bit her lip. ‘I’ve been thinking about it for days because… well, I haven’t been letting things like that trouble me as much as they should.’

‘Is that what you meant, when you said that Kate and Nella were instructive?’ Laris had only met them a few times, but any time at all would have been enough to notice that both of them were about as Starfleet as it was possible to be. 

‘Yes, I think—I think… Hearing how casually they talked about their work, and that’s all we ever talk about, all shop talk, all the time, which I hadn’t even realized before now—but hearing them go on as usual and feeling… alienated by it, feeling almost as though I didn’t know them at all, it was… yeah, instructive.’ She sighed. ‘I mean, there are other variables. Like, I’ve been in a pretty _weird_ place since…’ She laid a hand on Laris’s arm. ‘You know, so. I don’t know. But it gave me a lot to think about. _You_ gave me a lot to think about.’

‘Thank you,’ was all Laris could think to say to that.

‘For what?’

‘For thinking about it.’ It was something she loved intensely in her, she realized, how she thought through things, how she took things seriously. And being the object, or the occasion, of that thought, to be a thing that she took seriously, was a feeling that made Laris almost unsteady on her feet. 

‘Where do we go from here?’ Beverly asked softly.

‘What do you mean?’

Beverly hesitated. ‘What do you need in order to… what kind of… assurance can I give you?’

Something felt wrong to Laris about that formulation, but she couldn’t immediately see what. She wondered what assurance there could be that would settle the kinds of doubts and fears she had. She was sure there wasn’t any, as sure as she was that if she extracted some kind of commitment from Beverly now as, what, as insurance against the future? She was sure that it would make them miserable. She pulled her coat closed and crossed her arms over her chest and looked out over the vineyard, leaning back against the fence. 

‘A promise is a prison,’ she whispered, half-involuntarily. 

‘Hmm?’

‘A promise is a prison,’ she said more strongly, and smiled. Beverly looked at her with a very becoming sort of amused perplexity. ‘It’s a Qowat Milat maxim.’ She mimed an open book, and laughed. She understood it, suddenly, in a flash. ‘Never mind. The point is, it’s like you said. We’re here now, and next will be next. You said,’ her voice caught, and she paused to clear her throat. ‘You said you want to find out who I’ll be. We’ll find out together, who we’ll be to each other.’

Beverly’s smile was like the sun. ‘We will,’ she said. She sounded so confident. Then a little mischief crept into her voice: ‘And what would you say we are to each other now?’ The pointed challenge in her eyes was a rebuke Laris felt she could accept. And she knew exactly how she had to answer. 

She smiled and said, ‘A lot of things.’

Beverly, to her credit, glared at her for only a moment before it resolved into a laugh, and then she laughed and laughed. ‘Do you have any idea,’ she said eventually, ‘how much of a prison you aren’t?’

‘That’s very pretty,’ Laris said. ‘What does it mean?’ She expected Beverly to laugh again, or roll her eyes, but her gaze was soft and earnest.

‘I thought my life was settled,’ she said. ‘I was in a fixed position. And I was happy there; I think I could have gone on being happy there. But then,’ she gave a little laugh and looked Laris up and down with the considering lip-biting suggestive glance that made Laris’s every nerve light up, ‘then you just opened a door that I didn’t even know was there.’ 

There was only one reply Laris could think of to that, and it was to circle her arms around Beverly’s neck, and kiss her, and let her lift her, laughing, up onto the fence, and wrap her legs around her, and wind her hands in her hair, and laughing, kiss her. 

* * *

Late that night, Zhaban sat up reading in bed, bleary-eyed and staring at the page, scratching his beard til his cheeks felt raw. He hadn’t had a full night’s sleep all week, and he was reading the same sentence over and over again, but something kept him vigilant, unable to settle. 

Voices drifted through his open window—Laris and Beverly, taking the dog for his last outing. He caught Beverly’s animated voice midsentence: ‘… this _pit_ , right, and I ran right off the edge, just straight off the fucking edge, and he tried to catch me but I—oh, god—I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him right in with me,’ and Laris’s shout of laughter, and then their voices faded. A few minutes later, coming back toward the house, Beverly’s voice rose again: ‘So I said, have you considered _turning it off_?’, and then the high-pitched sobbing sound of Laris truly losing it. Their laughter muffled as they went inside and closed the door, and rose again, drifting up the stairs from the kitchen, and eventually fell quiet. 

He smiled and set aside his book. He’d ask for the story in the morning, if only for the sake of watching Laris try to tell it over Beverly. He turned off his light and listened for a while for her step across the hall, but the corridor was silent. Soon the dog nosed his door open and jumped to curl up at his feet, a thing he’d only do in a state of exile, and Zhaban sank back into his pillow with relief. He thought of Laris safe and adored at the other end of the house, and thought he’d get up early to make some pains au chocolat for Beverly, and wondered what else he had on hand. So taking mental inventory of his coffees, jams and honeys, he drifted slowly into a deep, unbroken sleep.


	11. Chapter 11

In the two weeks that remained to them, they settled back into their routine, and what was left of the empty shape at the center of it diminished day by day. Beverly worked more and more at Picard’s desk, the study doors wide open—unlike him, she liked to be interrupted—and seemed more and more at home there. At first Laris had thought that might create difficulties if—when—he returned, but then, perhaps it was for Beverly a way of being close to him. They cooked together, when Zhaban let them, and threw another party, for the hell of it. She liked watching Beverly start to know these people, her people, liked knowing her differently through the way she was with others, and it was truly a privilege to witness things like the whole room laughing at a story she told, or what happened when she got a little tipsy and Sami, in her smooth dapper way, with one suave gesture lit a smoke for her. And she thought she could grow used, perhaps, to how easily Beverly could wrap her arms around her, kiss her cheek, say silly, doting things, all right in front of others—to this woman from a culture of no privacy who wanted to show everyone what Laris was to her.

And they danced, she and Zhaban and Beverly together, after dinner now and then. The jazzy stage-show sort of partner dancing that made Beverly most joyous came naturally to Zhaban, and it was the greatest delight she could imagine to watch them swing each other around the terrace. She made an effort, too, with excruciating self-consciousness, and, with both more comfort and more difficulty, tried out some mornings under Beverly’s keen eye and careful hands the demanding formal postures of the technique called ‘ballet’. That, she thought she might even keep doing, and she asked Beverly to send her on some training holos, and wondered which wall of her studio might be the best place for a barre. 

She brought Beverly up there one afternoon, to show her. To show off, if she was honest, and she appreciated the way Beverly smiled at the feeling of the floor under her bare feet, the way she scuffed an absent little shuffle like she was introducing herself to it. And she was beautiful in the slant light. But Laris very quickly began to feel that it had been a mistake, to try to share this with her; she had thought perhaps she might put on some music, might see if she could get Beverly to loosen up her hips again, but once they were standing in that space together it seemed too small for two, and she feared for the first time losing its absoluteness, its inviolability, and she didn’t know how to say _There isn’t room for you here_. But before she had to say anything at all, Beverly kissed her, very sweetly, and thanked her for showing her the space—‘this little world’, she called it—and said, ‘I’ll leave you to it.’ And she did. And Laris felt the relief of the closing door drop right through the center of her, better than any vow or promise Beverly could possibly have made.

And at night, and in the early mornings, they were at home with each other’s bodies, so satisfied and never satiated, still learning, still discovering. The more they knew and understood each other, the more they craved each other, and she lost her fear of surrendering to the part of herself that was nothing but that deep demanding need. Under Beverly’s reassuring weight, her fine control, in her hands and in her voice, in Beverly’s complete trust in giving herself completely over, Laris found some unnameable, essential part of what was needed to restore the thing in her that had broken open, to shelter the rough unquiet animal of her heart. 

* * *

The advent of the day when the _Peseshet_ ’s shuttle came to collect her captain was in the end less sharp than Laris had anticipated—the prospect of Beverly’s six months’ tour out in the black no less daunting, but Laris’s confidence in her own ability to cope with it just a little more secure. When the time came, she and Zhaban walked Beverly to the top of the hill, hugged her, kissed her, piled foodstuffs into her arms, watched her board the shuttle, and watched the shuttle out of sight. 

Laris let out a heavy breath, still looking at the wide sky, unsettlingly blue.

Zhaban wrapped his arms around her from behind. She leaned into him. ‘She’ll be back, sahe’legge,’ he said. 

‘I know.’ She didn’t, not remotely. But she thought she might be learning.

He kissed her hair. ‘And he will, too.’

‘How can you possibly be so confident of that?’ How many times she’d asked him some verison of that question, she couldn’t count. When they were very young, she’d found the perennial optimism in him irritating, then inspiring; later, it began to strike her as naïve. But in recent years it had just come to seem insane. She loved him for it. ‘I mean really, _how_ , for all you’ve seen and everything you know, can you possibly believe that?’

‘We’re still here, aren’t we?’ he said softly, holding her close. ‘What are the odds of that?’

Laris snorted. ‘Slim to none, e’lev. I don’t call that reassuring.’ She sighed. ‘Let’s go home.’ 

His hand in hers _was_ reassuring, and the rythm of his gait as they made their slow quiet way down the hill. Before them lay the house and the vines, calling back to her. Beyond them, Sami and Béa’s pasture, and off to the west the grey-green haze of Francine’s lavender. She’d go to Toulouse next week, to see Prema. Maybe she could get Zhaban to come with her, and they could stay a few nights, go to that climate meeting. Maybe they could just spend some time in town. Maybe they could go dancing. 

This place had called and called her for a decade and a half, called her to belong to it, and she hadn’t ever found a way to answer. But she’d keep trying. Beverly would return, and so would Picard, and meanwhile, she’d keep trying.

**Author's Note:**

> Some notes on canon: for reasons purely of personal whim, I have located Château Picard in the Aude valley in Languedoc, instead of in Bourgogne or Bordeaux. In the show, Laris and Zhaban are portrayed as household staff; I reject this on the grounds that it is stupid, and have assumed they are equal partners in the household and business of the vineyard. For their backstory, I have cherry-picked what suits me from the Countdown comics and discarded the rest. 
> 
> I’ve borrowed a few words of Rihannsu (including that one, and Laris and Zhaban's epithets for each other) from Diane Duane; everything else here about Romulan culture that is not alpha canon, I made up.
> 
> As for the French: the terms by which Laris introduces Beverly are, respectively, 'our friend who is paying us a visit', 'a former colleague of Picard's,' and 'my (girl)friend,' which has a similar ambiguity to the English, but both less fraught and more intense. The exchange at the beginning of Chapter 6 is just small-talk: the greengrocer teases Laris for being cold, and she plays along. He remarks that a particular wine is selling quickly (‘flying away’) and he’ll be ordering more soon; she says she’ll pass that on to Zhaban and it will make him happy, and then they exchange the long string of nonsense pleasantries required to end a short conversation in French.
> 
> For what little actual information as appears here regarding the operation of a winery, I am endebted to Urška Krajnc’s blog at [evineyard.com](https://www.evineyardapp.com/blog/). (NB that this site is a commercial one designed to sell an app; I am, I hope obviously, in no way affiliated with it.) 
> 
> Finally, I have absolutely no idea if the one stardate I used is accurate. I used [this calculator](http://www.hillschmidt.de/gbr/sternenzeit.htm).


End file.
